Promises to Keep
by Sera dy Relandrant
Summary: "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." AU. What if Lyanna had survived childbirth and married Robert? What would happen to Jon? What if Rhaego had survived? What if Melisandre was right?
1. Promises

_But the music is lost and the words are gone  
>Of the song I sang as I sat alone,<br>Ages and ages have fallen on me -  
>On the wood and the pool and the elder tree.<br>_

**A Song of Enchantment - Walter de la Mare**

* * *

><p>In her dream, there had been music.<p>

The golden peals of the bells had mingled with the wood-notes of pipe, the silver skirl of the lute with the clanging Dornish cymbals. Sweet had been the maidens' laughter as they had danced in the pavilion of white silk, but sweeter still had been the music of the high harp that the prince of the sorrowing eyes had made.

In her dream, the weight of years had fallen from her, leaving her as slender and light-footed as she had been when a maid of four-and-ten. There had been a gown of gossamer upon her, spun as fine as running water or evening dew. And on her dark hair there had been a crown of roses, a Queen's crown of winter roses, bluer than Rhaegar's blood or Robert's eyes, blue as long-brewed sorrows.

In her dream, as in life, the prince whose strong lance had won her crown, had not held her in his arms, as she had longed to be held. In her dream, as in life, it had been a whitecloak who had danced with her, Ser Arthur Dayne, as stalwart and fair a knight as ever a maiden dreamt of. In life, they had cast her darkening looks, lords and damsels alike. The pavilion of white silk had been dark with whispers as they wondered to one another what the Dragon Prince had seen in the northern maiden. But the Sword of the Morning had bidden her be of good cheer, bidden her seek out the godswood for answers to the riddles that plagued her.

In her dream, he said nothing. He had smiled at her, a smile whiter than his cloak which ran scarlet with blood. It had been so when she had last seen him in life, after her brother, the gentlest of her brothers, had given him a steel kiss. She had first seen when she was a maid of four-and-ten, beneath the walls of a castle whose bricks were held together by the mortar of human blood and dragonfire. When she last saw him, she had been six-and-ten, with a newborn son in her arms. They had laid him to rest with three of his white brothers under a cairn and all she could think of as Eddard had said the last words had been of the promise she had taken from him. The promise that had taken his life.

_Please, _she had tried to tell him in the dream. _Please, I didn't mean to._ Before the Iron Throne, he had sworn his life to the dragon's blood. And before a pitiful bride of five-and-ten, who'd carried a dead man's child, he had sworn never to draw the blood of her brothers. _Please, please..._

But he had only smiled at her and held his silence. There was kindness in his silence, mercy and compassion for the child who was made a mother too young, but no forgiveness.

And then she had woken up. She woke up to the stench of ale, stale on a man's breath, and the ache of the bruises that mottled her arms. The ale and the bruises went together - there were times when he had it in him to be gentle, but last night had not been one of them. He had returned from the royal hunt in the kingswood, flushed with triumph and his blood heated with summerwine. He had laid the prized white hart at her feet before taking his pleasure. __It does not matter that the smallfolk call me another Alysanne the Good, __she had thought as he pinned her down, __in the bedchamber, _no woman is a queen. _

"Your Grace."

It is Jaime Lannister who touched his sword to his forehead, in salute, when she left the room which had stifled her moans the last night. If he noticed the trailing sleeves of her samite gown - indigo, she'd chosen on a whim, indigo for eyes that only visited her in her dreams - he made no mention of it.

"Kingslayer," she greeted him. Lesser men called him the Lion of Lannister to his face, and Kingslayer to his back. She was a queen and she called a man, any man, what she pleased. Even Robert - when he came to his senses she would call him a stinking boar and show him her bruises. He would cower and crave her pardon then and a gem, to make amends, would show up sooner or later. But she had called Lannister 'Kingslayer' for years, with no particular vim, to the point that it was almost an endearment.

He fell into stride behind her. "Where to, Your Grace?"

"Maester Colemon," she said. There was a little secret she had kept to herself for a month. She could not think of a better time to reveal it - to chasten and shame her royal husband with. Robert had been... difficult. But things would be better once the news came out that she was with child - his visits to her bedchamber stopped at those times, a small mercy she was grateful for.

"A harsh name, my queen, for one so faithful." The clasp that held his cloak was a lion, the sheen of white gold bright in the morning light.

"No less than you deserve," she said, turning her face away. They had laid Elia's babes as gifts before the Iron Throne in cloaks of Lannister crimson, gilded with lions. A clever choice - the red soaked up the blood so well you might have thought the little ones were only asleep. _Please. Please, I didn't mean to. _

"I used to stand guard outside Queen Rhaella's door, you know. When King Aerys was with her."

_And did she scream as loud as me? _"Oh."

"He had nails a foot long, Aerys did," Lannister said thoughtfully. "Compared to him, I would call Robert as gentle a lover as the Knight of Flowers."

"From what I remember," she said dryly. "Aerys wielded no warhammers. Robert might not have the nails but he does have the muscles. And Aerys never drank so."

"He didn't need to drink. His madness went to his head quicker than any drink could." He smiled at her. "Shall I tell you, my lady, when he would visit his queen? His visits were rare - for which, I am sure, she was only too grateful. But whenever he gave a man to the flames, then he would find his desire as quick as any lesser man. Only the sight of a man cooking in the flame, cooking in his armour-"

She held up her hand, bile rising in her throat. Lord Rickard Stark had cooked in his armour and his son had hung while he tried to reach for his sword. "I could have your head for that, Kingslayer," she whispered. "I _should_ have your head."

"Kingslayer," he mused. "I killed a king for Rhaella. Robert killed a prince for you. The things we do for the love of women, won't you agree?" He was smiling at her, a smile as white as his cloak.

_Arthur once smiled at me so, _she thought. _And yet he was never mine, he was Rhaegar's. Rhaegar who loved Elia more than he could ever love me. _Jaime might coin japes to make her laugh, but he was ever his sister's pawn. She made sure that she never forgot that. "I wept tears of joy when I heard," she lied. "It... it was a fitting end for him, to die at Robert's hands."

"Just out of a ballad," he said, nodding. "Poetic justice. There's a new lay they're singing in the winesinks, did you know? 'The Dragon and the Rose' they call it, though I'd wager Robert wouldn't like the tune of it."

"Is it sad?" Robert did not like sad songs. Rhaegar... Rhaegar had once sung sad songs.

"Oh dreadfully," he said cheerfully. "A fair young maid who fled with the prince of her dreams, for love. They shared the sweetest month of bliss and then the prince rode away to face an usurper who would have the fair maid for himself and... well you know the rest."

"A new idea," she observed. "As I recall it, I never fled for love. I was raped." She had had fourteen years to perfect the lie. "Raped, Lannister, like a-a camp follower, a whore-" She thought of the last night and now the lie came sweeter than any truth. "Rhaegar, do you know what he did to me? He would hold me down and-and strike me until the blood ran, because he said the memory of my maiden's blood was sweet. And then he'd ask me if-if Robert had ever pleasured me, if I had ever-"

He looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Peace," he said. "My lady, you had best compose yourself."

With a jolt she realized that she had almost been close to tears. They were out of her private chambers now and there would be other people now. People who would notice the Queen's face and ask what was amiss, who would fret and fuss. "My apologies," she said stiffly, wiping her face. "Am I- am I quite presentable now?"

He looked like he pitied her. "A rose of loveliness," he said gallantly.

"A rose," she sniffed. "Kingslayer, don't tell me about roses. A man once gave me a pretty crown of roses." _And I would have followed him to the ends of the world in a beggar's rags, if I could have but those roses. But it was not to be, was it? Robert robed me in a queen's samite and he gave me another crown to wear. _

* * *

><p>The morning sickness had come upon her, just before breakfast. <em>A man cooking in his armour, <em>she'd thought groggily as her maid had held back her hair and let her throw up the remains of her supper. _Lannister once said there's no stench so sour as that of burning flesh. _She'd never smelt it before, though - the closest she had come to that had been when she'd burnt Catelyn Tully's hair when she was seven.

Now she could only toy with her breakfast, artfully rearranging the blood oranges and beef-and-bacon pies on her trencher. Robert was still in his drunken stupor - from long experience, she knew that she need not expect his company till eventide. Her older boys, twelve-year-old Brandon and eleven-year-old Joffrey, who had accompanied their father on the hunt, were still asleep too. The younger children were breakfasting with their nurses. She had invited Jon Arryn and his lady wife to her solar for breakfast - the realm would not wait on the King's good grace.

Lysa's flinty eyes missed nothing. They were so like Catelyn's eyes. "Will you not try a lemon pie, Your Grace?" she asked sweetly. "You favour them so."

"Not today," she said politely. Before Lysa could feign surprise and press her for a reason - everyone knew how much she loved lemon pies - she hastily added, "I am with child. It is the morning sickness." The very thought of lemon pies, layered with sugar and icing, made her nauseous.

Lysa, who had borne only one living child, said nothing. But Jon said plenty. "That will make seven!" he said as heartily as though she had planned for it to happen. "Seven royal children, won't the High Septon be pleased? He'll have a lovely sermon to make when it is announced-"

She smiled. "You forget that I am forsworn to the Old Gods," she said lightly. _Not seven, _she thought dully. _Eight, this will be my eighth child. _

"Princess Elaena Targaryen bore seven children," Lysa observed. She was a great reader, she was - by the time she was three-and-ten she had finished King Daeren's _Conquest of Dorne. _At thirty, Lyanna had still not been able to finish more than twenty pages of the dreary tome. "And then she decided that if seven was good enough for the gods, it was good enough for her."

"Robert will not be put off as easily as the princess's husbands were," she only said.

"You had best put him off," Lysa said importantly. "Or try moon tea." _And moon tea for the false heart's cup, a touch of tansy and and a spoon of honey, mint and pennyroyal and wormwood for the shamed maid's cup. _"At _your_ age, childbed can turn into a bloodier bed than you would have wished for."

Her stomach lurched uneasily. The bloody bed. It had come perilous close to that... the first time. "I thank you for your concern," she only said. "I am not so old yet and the maesters have always seen me through." There had been no maesters the first time, only Wylla the Midwife who had no knife to slice through her belly, no herbs, no poultices for her fever. _As though he knew I might die. As though he wanted me to die. _

Jon's voice broke through her musings, measured, calm and... slightly reproachful for some reason. "Renly has sealed a betrothal contract," he said. "To Margaery Tyrell."

She nearly spat out the blood orange she'd been nibbling at. "Not Loras Tyrell's sister!" she squealed, fascinated. "Gods - Loras' _sister_? Renly's little rose..." She chuckled. "A mummers' marriage, to be sure. I look forward to the bedding."

Jon frowned. "The Rose of Highgarden," he said. "Renly is not as great a fool as he looks. I had once suggested that we betroth Brandon to the Tyrell girl-" Oh. That accounted for the reproachfulness.

"Bran's twelve," she said airily. "And Loras' sister will be what, fifteen? Sixteen?"

"Only fourteen," he said. "Young enough. Young and comely and-"

"He's only twelve," she said dismissively. "Far too young for us to consider a betrothal. In time, we shall find us another Margaery, younger and comelier and with ten times as many blades to her name." _  
><em>

Lysa rose primly. "I shall be off," she announced. "Sweetrobin will be missing his mother."

She couldn't help it. She sniggered. Robert Arryn, heir to the Eyrie and the Wardenship of the East, was still on his mother's teat at the age of six. When her own boys had been that age, they'd been playing with daggers.

Lysa shot her a hard look. "Alcuin has been asking for you, my lady," she said with poisonous sweetness. "He wants to know why his mother is too busy for him, why he hasn't seen her for a week. What am I to tell him, poor, sweet babe, he's only three? That his royal mother can hardly make time for her firstborn, and how will she make time for a fourth son?"

It would be like Lysa to say a thing like that to a child. She bit her lip and controlled her temper. She had dealt with worse than Lysa Arryn. "I shall see the children today," she said. _Though gods know how I shall make time. _"After we have held court."

* * *

><p><em>Yes, where is he, the champion and the child of all that's great or little, wise or wild?<br>Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones;  
>Whose table, earth - whose dice were human bones? <em>

**The Age of Bronze - Lord Byron**

* * *

><p><em>Hellishly uncomfortable, <em>he had told her when she had asked him about the Iron Throne, the Conqueror's throne forged from kings' blades. He had made a face and tweaked her nose. _And ugly. Monstrously ugly, the whole room, with those dragons' skulls lining the walls and those slits for windows, it's so dark we need candles even at noon..._

_I should like to see it, _she'd whispered, snuggling closer to him. _Father told me so much about it. _

_And so you shall, sweet one, _he'd promised her. _You and Elia will both sit by me and together we shall rule. There are changes that must be made, changes that I was too craven to make. _

But Rhaegar had fallen and Elia had been murdered and she alone remained to make true the changes they had once dreamt of. _No, not me, _she reminded herself. _Not me alone. I have always had good help, good counsel. I am no Rhaegar to rule as he might once have ruled - I can only do my best and pray that it is enough. _

Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King, sat the Iron Throne. He sat it more often than Robert, if truth were told, but that was all to the good - justice was dispensed faster when her royal husband was abed. She'd perched on the throne once, for a jape, and cut herself. Ever since, she had been more than content with her seat on the council table, far below the Siege Perilous.

"Lannister brigands," Jon repeated slowly, the words souring the air. "And what proof have you?" One by one, the tattered smallfolk of Holdfast Sherrer knelt before him to offer their tales. They came by night and fired our fields, m'lord. They stole my milch cow, my Bessy, and took my girls for sport. They put the lance clean through my babe and an arrow through me mam's eye. And there was one that was like a Mountain, m'lord, like a Mountain that rides...

She did not dare turn her face to Lord Tywin Lannister, who sat beside her on the council table. _You had best see to your dogs, my lord, _she thought grimly. _A mad dog can turn upon his master as quick as he can upon his master's enemies. _

"The Mountain that rides," she said, in a clear voice that cut through the drowse of the peasants' mumbligs. They turned to their queen, to a queen in samite with steel in her eyes. "Can there be any doubt that it is brave Ser Gregor Clegane? Good Ser Gregor Clegane whose lands adjoin Holdfast Sherrer. And Wendish Town and Mummer's Ford, aye, whose walls were smoked not a moon's turn ago?"

Perhaps pregnancy had made her reckless, but it was an old grudge with her, a grudge that had chaffed and festered, as raw as an open wound. Her revenge had been long-brewed, fourteen years in the brewing and now she turned to Jon, Jon who had become as much a father to her over the years as he was to Robert and Ned.

"What have you to say, my lord?" Jon asked Lord Tywin coolly. "He is sworn to your house."

Lord Tywin's eyes said many things. He say a girl, younger than his own daughter, who dared shame him but for once she felt secure in her recklessness. Robert would trust his foster-father's council over a Lannister's, gods be thanked. Robert could be trusted in few matters but arms was not one of them. When she was with him, she knew no harm might come to her - save from him alone. _Try me, _she thought, looking at the lion lord and waiting for his answer. _Try me and you try Robert. And there is nothing Robert likes better than flushing out rebel lords._

"He would seem to match Lord Clegane's description," he said. "If we were to pay heed to the words of a few churls. Fear can rewrite a man's lineaments. Should you, my queen, have ridden by night and by smoke there would still be plenty who would have vowed that they had seen a mountain who rode."

_Fuck you too, _she thought sulkily._ Tywin: 1. Lyanna: 1. _

"Be that as it may," Jon said silkily. "Our task is not to question and accuse, nor sow discord with ill-placed strife and the petty rivalries of a court. It is our task to restore the king's peace and to deliever his justice." That was like Jon - to stand head and shoulders above the mass and mess of court intrigues. She was ashamed to remember how much of a place _she _had in sowing the discord he spoke of - in supporting her own faction against that of the Lannisters. In the streets, they spoke of the Queen's wolves and the lions who were sworn to Lord Tywin and his good-son. The good-son was Lord Stannis, Prince of Dragonstone, who had wed Cersei Lannister after King Robert had taken Lyanna Stark to wife.

_Gods be good, Rhaegar would never have failed in his duty so. _

"This matter is no small one, nor mean," he continued. "This is not the first report we have received, nor will it be the last. As the Kingswood Brethren were once the bane of King Aerys' reign, so does this mystery of the Mountain's men seem to be the bane of King Robert's. A ponderous hand is needed to place judgment. It cannot be mine, I fear, for this matter is too weighty for me alone. I must needs consult with His Grace."

She could see the bewilderment on the faces of the good folk of Holdfast Sherrer as he thanked them for their troubles and promised them justice and recompense. There was more at stake than a few smoking holdfasts here and Jon was reluctant to pass judgment before those who headed the two mightiest factions in the Seven Kingdoms - the Queen and the Warden of the West.

_This shall go to Robert, _she thought, with a sideways glance at Lord Tywin. _And at any other time, he might have been moved to caution by Jon's time but not this time, no. _Robert was not so great a fool as she had once believed - he trusted her in many things, but this might not be one of them. The last king who had shamed Lord Tywin Lannister had not met a happy end. But this time would be different. _I have a bargaining chip in my belly that you do not, my lord._

The petitioners of Sherrer were led away and more came to take their place. She drummed her fingers against her thigh as she thought. The Mountain who rides, they called him. Gregor Clegane who'd dashed Rhaegar's heir's head against the walls and raped the mother, with her babe's blood and brains still slick on his hands. It made her nauseous as she pictured her babies, her black-haired, blue-eyed little ones, and the oldest one too, the one who had looked so like Ned when she'd last seen him...

The second time she had traded her maiden's cloak for a husband's, she had been seventeen. Her first troth gift had been a crown of roses given to her when she was little more than a child, blue roses whose hidden thorns had pierced her breast. The second time she had been older, older by two years and wiser by a hundred she thought. For her troth gift, she had begged for justice, justice and a man's head that they might send as a gift to Dorne.

Robert was a man of his word and he'd given her a head - just not the one she had wanted - and justice too, he'd thought. After she had donned his cloak, onyx and gold and so heavy that she sagged under it, just as she had sagged under the weight of his crown, they had brought the tarred head to her, right in the sept. At first she had not recognized it, but then they had brought a mantle too, a queen's mantle of purple velvet lined with hair of silver-gold...

_I thank you, my sweet lord, _she had told him, before the two thousand who had gathered to see a king wed to the girl he had won a kingdom for. _I thank you for delievering me justice. _

She'd bled for him, that night. _Maiden's blood would have been sweeter_, he had said, grappling at her, making her cry out. _That bastard, he cheated me, and do you know what I did to him that day? On the Trident? Ned never told you, did he? Well, let me tell you, sweetling. I took my warmhammer and I smashed into his damn chest, I smashed right through and I heard the ribs cracking and he screamed, Lyanna, it was the sweetest sound. He screamed out and I smashed again and all the time I was only thinking of you, what he'd done to you and I laughed, I laughed..._

And the rubies had swirled like tears of blood in the rivers of the Trident and her blood had swirled about her legs as he took her again and again and again.

* * *

><p>"Mother!"<p>

Alcuin was her baby, only three years old_. Robert's ravens, _Renly would jest, for there was nothing in the children to suggest that she was their mother. They all had his black hair, his dark good looks, his ringing laughter and most of them had his guileless blue eyes too. Not Alcuin though - he had his mother's eyes.

_He looks so like me that you would cry, _Ned had written her, not a week before. _He has the Stark colouring, and Cat grieves that none of her trueborn sons look so like me. He has Father's hard mouth and Brandon's skill with the sword, your eyes and Benjen's knack for making faces. But I would say that he looks most like your horsefaced brother.  
><em>

She scooped him up and hugged him fiercely, kissing his forehead and his chubby cheeks and the smudge of dirt on the tip of his nose. She held him to her heart, relishing the feel of his plump, little body and the clean, sweet freshness of the way he smelt. And as she held him, she could not forget that Rhaegar's little girl had been three when the lions had found her hiding under her father's bed. _As though she thought he might still save her..._

_And what would I do for you, my sweet? _she thought, as he wriggled to be set down. She could not let him go, not now, she needed to hold him a bit longer, to feel that he was still hers, still warm and sweet and strong. _Elia had a kingdom too, and Rhaegar a sword and an army, and their little girl still died from half-a-hundred thrusts. They had justice on his side, justice and courage and honour, and I have none and yet seven of my children live while Elia's are all dead._

"I want to learn to use a sword!" Alcuin announced. "Mother, mayn't I, please...?"

"He has begged for a week," his nurse admitted shyly. "A score of times have I told him no but that will not do for my little prince, he must ask his mother..."

_So that has been why he has been begging for me. _"No, Alcuin," she said, putting him down. "Not till you are older and bigger and stronger." _No, Lyanna, not a crossbow. Not till you are older and bigger and stronger. _

"But I want to!" Alcuin said, pouting. "I'm a prince!"

"Even princes must learn to wait," she told him. "More than anyone else, they must learn to wait. There, love, don't cry - you never see Robert Arryn troubling his mother for swords to play, do you? And he's twice your age, isn't he?"

"He's a _baby_," Al announced. "He stinks of milk and he's _always_ crying, I don't want to play with him, Mother, he shivers all over and I don't like that-"

_An old man's seed. Pity the day that his father dies. _"Would you like to see your brothers?" she asked him. "They are in the fencing courts." He was too little to wear a sword now, but it would do no harm to let him watch his brothers. She had grown up listening to swords singing and she had brought up her sons in the same way - not as petted princes, but as boys to be thumped and whacked and bruised in the courts.

"Yes!" he squealed and danced with excitement as she led him to the Maiden's Court where the princes and the silvercloaks practiced.

They were there, her three boys - Bran, Joff and pensive eight-year-old Edric whom no one called Ned. Bran and Joff, as alike as two peas in a pod, were sparring. Edric, as round as a ball in his padded armour, was faced with what looked like Stannis and Cersei's younger boy. A few of the silvercloaks were practicing, and Mya Stone and Brienne of Tarth were stripping off their sweat-soaked practice clothes at the rim of the court. Mya seemed to have gotten the better of this bout, judging from the smug look on her face. Brienne was _big _but Mya was as nimble as a mountain goat.

The silvercloaks, named by jape the Queen's terriers because once they took hold they never let go, were her pride and joy. Robert had laughed when she had brought it up. Jon had smiled and shaken his head. Lord Tywin had given her a _look_ and that look had been all she needed to know about what he thought about women in armour.

_But I wouldn't back down, _she thought with pleasure. _I let Robert laugh and call me a pretty fool, but in the end I got what I wanted, didn't I? His goldcloaks drink and dice and whore, but not my silvercloaks, no. Never let it be said that a woman's arm is not as strong as a man's, that her justice is not as sweet. _She knew from experience that a woman wronged would turn more willingly to a woman than a man. The goldcloaks reported to a chain of petty officials but the Queen's silvercloaks reported only to their queen or to their commander-in-chief - Obara Sand, who'd learnt the spear's justice at the Red Viper's knee. _  
><em>

Alcuin scrambled up a railing and perched on it. "Bran!" he yelled. "Joff! Look at me!"

Joff just had time to wave before he had to dodge from Bran's blade. _Bran is hardier, but Joff's the better blade, _Lyanna thought, admiring how quick he was, the clean grace in the way he moved. _He is just like Brandon was, at his age, _she thought and remembered, with a dull pain, how Ned had praised little Jon's swordplay in his last letter.

"Hullo little brother," Mya said cheerfully, tousling Al's hair. "Your Grace," she said, bowing to her.

She touched Mya's hair, so snagged and snarled that she was sure Mya cut it herself. With a dagger. "Don't tell me you've cut your hair," she said. "If I had hair as pretty as yours, I wouldn't."

Mya flicked her chin-length black hair. "Hair has a _way_ of threading into chainmail," she said thoughtfully. "Danya found that out on patrol, the night we flushed out Fleabottom. It ripped right from her scalp and-"

"Please Mya," she begged. "Not in front of Alcuin."

Mya shrugged. "He'll have heard bloodier tales from his nurse," she said bluntly. "I did when I was a little girl."

She could still remember Mya as a little girl, she could still remember the first time she had heard of Mya too, when Mya had still been a babe suckling at her mother's breast. _He has bastards! _she'd screamed in Ned's face and sat stony-faced through the banquet that night, when her father had announced her betrothal to Robert. _Cruel blood, craven's blood_, she'd thought as she remembered all the fell tales Old Nan had whispered to her of bastards. _They are born under a dark star. _Two years later, she had sent her own child in a bastard's guise to Catelyn.

_The gods are good to those who are good, _she'd thought, repeating Old Nan's words. _If I have care of Robert's child, Catelyn will see to my child and be kind to him. _

And so believing, she had brought Robert's firstborn from the Vale to King's Landing. Mya had been five, half-mule, half-girl, a mirror to the two daughters she would later bear Robert. It had been Mya who had taught Joff and Bran and Edric to string a bow, Mya who'd taught Daeryssa and Dagna and Al to ride, Mya who had donned a silver cloak instead of a husband's when she came of age. _Though there were certainly no lack of offers, _she thought dryly. _She is twice as beautiful as I was when I was her age. She is baseborn, but what of it? So was Shiera Seastar._

There had been other bastards, of course there had been - she had known there would be since her betrothal, when she was little older than Bran was now. It had been enough for her to resent the idea of marrying him at all - once. Later of course, his infidelities had meant nothing - she had suffered worse at his hands than a few baseborn children. She had other duties, higher duties, and for the sake of them one bastard or a thousand would mean nothing. She had even grown to love the ten black-haired children she'd raised under the same roof as her own, bull-headed Gendry and Ioana who would flirt with anything that had legs, Ted the dreamer who brought her a nosegay of wildflowers every morning... and there would be another one soon.

Varys had told her, the last week, about the child a freckled little whore at Chataya's carried. The poor child was five-and-ten, younger than Mya and Ioana, and Varys had intimated that she would be loath to part with the child, even for a queen. _A foolish girl, _he had said languidly. _As though a child were a plaything. _

_Let her keep the babe if she will, _she had told him. _See her provided with coin - gold if she must purchase her freedom from Chataya. Enough to keep a king's daughter. _She had been only a little older than the whore from Chataya's when she had parted with her own child. She knew the price of parting with a babe and so knowing, how could she make anyone else suffer through it?

* * *

><p>What the godswood had been to her, when she was a girl growing up in the north, the parapets of the Red Keep were to her now that she reigned as the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Her brothers sought the godswood for penance and prayer, her father for pleasure. But by the still black waters of the heart and the brooding face of the weirwoods, she would sit and dream.<p>

_Did you dream here, Rhaegar? _she thought, only half-listening to Brienne who was telling her about the orphanages. _Did you dream and hope and plan for your kingdom, thinking of the long years of hard winter that lay ahead? While you played the game of the gods, my love, did you think yourself a god too? A god with years and years and naught to fear save the white gods of the north and the red gods of the south? You thought the game of thrones below you, but in the end, the fools tread where the gods feared to. _

And so she looked over the parapets, over the maze of towers and roofs, gilded in the sunset light, and the wretched shanties of Flea Bottom from which the silvercloaks plucked homeless children to train them in the Queen's orphanages. _The realm has enough whores and pickpockets, _she'd thought as she'd driven through Flea Bottom, years ago, and watched the barefoot children who'd crept out of their hovels to see. _And whores and pickpockets will what these will be. What we need is maesters and herbwives, smiths and seamstresses, strong arms to till the land and bear arms when winter comes. _And so, the orphanages had begun, where the children were taught to read, write, cipher and to pick up the skills the Seven Kingdoms would need when the long winter, which Rhaegar had forseen, came.

She looked over the Blackwater and the ships that sailed on it, and the hills named for the Conqueror and his sisters. And so looking, she felt a part of it, piece and parcel of the Seven Kingdoms, bound to the land and the waters of all seven as she had once been bound to the north - and later, to a man.

_Mine, _she thought fiercely. _It's mine, all mine. When winter comes, I'll be ready for it. _

"Thank you, Brienne," she said, when the girl finished. "Have you had any letters from Maester Aemon?"

A Queen's correspondence was always checked - she knew that Grand Maester Pycelle was in Lord Tywin's payrolls - and it would have looked passing strange if she were seen to correspond with a Targaryen. But who would think to check on Brienne, homely, simple-minded Brienne with a face like an auroch's backside? _And a heart like gold, _Lyanna thought, loving the girl. _And arms like steel. _

"No, Your Grace."

"Well, send him one from me," she said. "Tell him we're expecting to add a seventh raven to Robert's flock. And... send a message to Obara from me, will you? Tell her that revenge is a dish best served cold and bid her ask the petitioners of Holdfast Sherrer how their complaints were received." _That should please her father at any rate. _"And you'd best be polishing your armour, Brienne. You'll ride for me in the tourney."

Brienne blinked. "A tourney, my lady? I had not had word."

"It's not announced," she said. "But it will be, soon enough. Robert's always thought a tourney's the best way to welcome a new baby... and no doubt he'll want to honour his brother Renly and his little Tyrell bride." _If Littlefinger were not such a wizard with coin, we would have been sorely tried with debt, _she thought, blessing the little man whom she trusted not a jot. _As it is, we barely manage. _Robert would insist on a tourney - he always did - but this time, she would make Mace Tyrell pay for it. _Serves you right for marrying your daughter to a prince of the blood._

"A baby and a bride!" A ringing laugh greeted her and she turned to see Cersei Baratheon climbing up the spiralling steps to the parapets, in a swirl of scarlet robes. Her twin followed her, as close as a shadow. "How _sweet_."

"Good sister," she greeted her. _This should be interesting. _Cersei was... fascinating to say the least. _She would seduce Robert with her body and me with her mind. I cannot say which is more beautiful. _"Back from Dragonstone so soon?"

"Exiled," the woman said, reaching her. She held out her arms, with a smile as radiant as the sun. "Stannis will not have me - but good sister, will you not clasp me in your arms?"

She slipped into the older woman's embrace, meekly enough. A wave of perfume and two little kisses, as sweet as stolen apples. "Stannis' loss is but our gain," she said politely, stepping away. Cersei always made her feel light-headed, in a way Jaime and Lord Tywin never did. _And so the games begin. _The games that Rhaegar had shunned, but which she had come to enjoy. _You can have your gods, my love, I have come to like playing with thrones. _"No doubt Robert will be delighted. You have brought the children?"

"Tommem was crossing swords with Edric and Tygett bartering lances with Bran when last I left them," she said, referring to her younger and older son. Tommem was seven, Tygett twelve. "Daeryssa was kind enough to invite Myrcella to go hawking with her."

"Daeryssa is out hawking?" she asked. "Ah... I have not seen her these past two days, neither her nor Dagna. Where did they go?"

It spoke volumes for her relationship with her daughters that Cersei, who had only been in King's Landing a few hours, knew more about their whereabouts than she did. "By the Blackwater, I do believe," she said. "You need have no fears about their safety - Ser Barristan attends them."

"And Dagna? Is she out hawking too?" Dagna had five years to Daeryssa's nine, but she had never had Daeryssa's fondness for sport.

"She is playing at dolls with my Lyanna," Cersei said, smiling as sweetly as the Maiden herself.

_My Lyanna. _Cersei's younger daughter, four-year-old Lyanna, was the only one of her brood with black hair and blue eyes - the only one with the Baratheon colouring, for the others were all as golden as Lann the Clever. Cersei had lain with Robert, she well knew - though whether to spite her lord husband or her queen, for ambition or for pleasure, Lyanna had never been able to find out. She half-suspected that the girl they'd named after her was Robert's - but she had no proof.

"Robert shall be delighted to see Lyanna," she said evenly. "How well he loves the child, she is more a daughter to him than a niece."

Cersei smiled. "How could he not?" she asked easily. "She bears your name and His Grace's fondness for you is well known. Seven children - why that is proof enough for any woman of his constancy."

_Robert's constancy. _She had to laugh. "Robert has sixteen bastards to six trueborn children and one still in the belly," she said. "I would call him fecund, lascivious but constant? No."

"I wonder at your charity, your kindness," Cersei said. "To keep ten of them under your own roof, to bed them with your own children! How you bear it, I cannot imagine." There was an edge to her voice as she said, "If it were Stannis, I would have seen them all dead."

"Then you are lucky that Stannis is a man of honour," she said mildly and thought, _No, I am not charitable. I am not kind. I am only just. If I nurture Robert's bastards with mine own children, Catelyn might find pity enough in her heart to love the child I sent her. _

"Say rather a man of stone," she said, shaking her curly head. "We are as well suited as wildfire and ice. My good lord can no longer bear the sight of me and mine and so he must needs send me here." She smiled at her brother. "Not that I mind."

_I wish Ben would've stayed, _she thought as jealousy stabbed her heart. She hated the way Jaime and Cersei looked at eachother, the secrets of long years heavy in their shared glance. When she had wed Robert, Benjen had stayed with them a few years but in the end he had left her. _My place is in the north with Ned, _he had said. _As your place is here, at the heart of the realm. We both have our duties. When winter comes..._

She'd told him about Rhaegar. It was the least she could do, after he had suffered so for her. _I vowed to take the black, _he'd told her. _If anything had happened to you..._

_It's not your fault, _she'd said. _I chose to run away. The blame was all my own - it had nothing to do with you. _

He'd given her a rueful smile. _And yet you still believe that Father and Brandon died because of your folly - not Aerys' madness. Let me cling to my belief that it was my fault, just as you cling to yours - guilt and remorse and the hope of redemption is all we have left to us now, all that is left to sustain us until winter comes.  
><em>

_It's summer now, _she'd told him, trying to lighten his mood. _Maybe it's the Long Summer the gods have blessed us with, now that the dragons and their sins are dead. _

He'd looked at her and laughed. _And do you really believe that? _

No, not for a minute, no. Winter was coming - the winter that Rhaegar had seen. The winter that he had told her to be ready for, even if he should never come back. _Promise me, _he'd whispered to her, just before he'd ridden away for the last time. He'd left a heartsick girl of fifteen, heavy with child, but he'd sworn her to a vow. _Promise me.  
><em>

She listened to Cersei's chatter and smiled compliantly, but her heart was elsewhere. _I've tried, _she thought. _My love, it hasn't been easy but I've tried. _For the sake of her children, she'd have gladly died, but Rhaegar was different. For his sake, she'd lived and tried to live gladly. _I've tried. _

* * *

><p>The maid stripped off her outer-robe and she stepped out from the screen in only her shift.<p>

"Gods bless you, you're as beautiful as when I first saw you," he said, sipping from a bowl of broth.

She took her place by the fire, signalling to the maid to brush her hair. "That's hardly a compliment," she observed. "The first time you saw me I'd been romping in the mud with Ben and you thought me a stable-boy."

"Here - let me," he said, taking the brush out of the maid's hand. "Alyx - leave us."

She spread her arms over the cushions of her chair, the better so that he might see the welts that were green and purple all over them. She ought to have put a salve on them, they ached so, but she wanted him to see. _Tywin: 1. Lyanna: 2._ And she felt instant guilt for counting points.

"So..." she tipped her head back and let him brush her hair. Her hair had always held some incomprehensible fascination for Robert. "You're having another baby?"

_Tywin: 2. Lyanna: 2. _The element of surprise was gone. "Who told you?" she asked, keeping her voice steady.

"Lysa."

_Now isn't it high time that Sweetrobin was fostered..._

"I hope it's a girl this time," he continued. "Four boys is enough for anybody."

_Five, _she thought, with a tightening in her chest. _Not four, five. _"Daeron the Second had four," she said coolly. "And they died quick enough. _I_ want a boy."_ A boy with Ned's face so that I can pretend it's my first little baby, come back to me. A boy with winter in his eyes. _She hesitated before adding, "I was thinking that... if it was a boy, we might name him for Jon."

He grunted. "The old man's got enough namesakes - didn't Ned name his bastard for him?"

There. He'd said the very thing she dreaded he might - four times had she given him sons and four times had she thought of the first one, the one she'd given away because of the promise she'd made to his father.

"One can never do with enough namesakes," she said coolly. The Red Keep had taught her to play the game of thrones_. _"I was so pleased when Cersei named her little girl for me."

He turned his face away, ashamed. Black-haired, blue-eyed Lyanna - Cersei's badge of honour and Robert's shame. _Tywin: 2. Lyanna: 3._ A skilful general knew when to retreat so she added, "I was hoping that we might go to Winterfell for this one's birth. It's been so long..."

He heard the wistfulness in her voice and touched her face gently. He'd known her as a girl at Winterfell, the laughing girl who'd danced under the shade of the weirwoods, who he'd won a kingdom for. "Of course," he said. "Gods, it's been what - seven years? Of course you've missed it. It'll be good to see Ned and Catelyn and the children-"

"And the wolves and the boars," she reminded him, grinning. "You loved to hunt at Winterfell - there's no game as fresh as that the north offers."

"Unless it's in the west," he bantered. "They've lions there, in the forests, to the wolves of your woods."

_Direwolves in the snow, _she thought, remembering Ned's last letter. _Jon convinced me to take them. _She'd last seen the boy when he was seven - he'd be twice as old now. _Will he recognize me? _she thought. _Will he kneel to me as he did then? _

"Direwolves," she said, keeping her tone light, sealing off her face even as she smiled at him. "You wouldn't believe Ned's last letter, it starts like..."

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Lyanna and Robert's children are:**

**Brandon (12), Joffrey (11), Daeryssa (9), Edric (8), Dagna (5), Alcuin (3)  
><strong>


	2. Remembrances and Reminders

_Once she dreamed of romance_  
><em> Once she imagined she lived in a castle<em>  
><em> Once she held the world in her hands,<em>  
><em> Once was a long time ago,<em>  
><em> Far far away-when she was young<em>  
><em> she looked towards the future<em>  
><em> Eyes full of promise, a heart filled with joy<em>  
><em> How had her road twisted so harshly<em>  
><em>Can these two women be one and the same?<em>

**Far, Far Away - Blackmore's Night**

* * *

><p>In her dream, she was a bride once more.<p>

She was seventeen once more and the hair that rippled down to her waist was as dark as polished wood... soft and thick and shining with but the one thread of silver running through it. The women who had dressed her hair that morning had tsked when they'd seen it and told her that it was not to be wondered, she had known too many sorrows for her years... and then they had tucked that strand away because she would not let them snip it off as they wanted to. They had buried the shame of it away, under the pearls of the diadem that had once graced Queen Naerys' brow, Naerys of the Thousand Sorrows, Naerys the pale sister of the Knight of Tears. They had buried it as she would bury her secret sins and shames in her heart - she could bury it but could never snip it off, it had become too much a part of her.

_For remembrance. As a reminder, _she had thought as they they cinched the waist of the white gown tighter. Maiden's white, though the world knew that she was no maid. There were some who thought it unseemly - a deflowered bride might wear pink or blue or yellow, but never white. But it had been Robert's command - as though by robing her white he might make a maiden of her once again, claim the sweet young girl he'd lost his heart to and the prize he'd fought a war for. She could not blame him. Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.

There were snowflakes on her gown, snowflakes lined with sparkling crystals that flung back a seven-tinted rainbow light when the sun shone on them. Snowflakes in summer. They did not cool her. She could think only of a man roasting in his armour.

Jon Arryn had her ride through the streets of King's Landing in an open chariot that day. _They have seen their new king, _he had told her when she'd chewed her lip and fought back tears. _Surely they should be allowed to see his queen? _

The roads to Baelor's Sept were lined with men, women and children, agog with gossip and rumour. They had thought to see the Maiden herself, an enchantress whose beauty had driven kings to damnation. They had heard the lays and the ballads of the winter rose the dragon and the stag had contended for. They had brothers and sons who had died on both sides of the Trident for her. The stench of spite and malice and even resentment was choking.

Cersei Lannister and Lysa Arryn had ridden before her, the one in wildfire-green, the other in river-blue. Their beauty was like a flame and when men saw the pale, faded girl behind them they whispered that the new king seemed like to be as mad as the old one. The women were kinder - there were some among them who had kissed their lovers for the last time when their kings had called their banners. They had bidden their own sweethearts goodbye with the same smile stitched on their faces, the same grief in their eyes.

In Baelor's Sept, she was caught in a firestorm of spangled light. The crystals flashed by the flickering light of the candles and the magpie-bright eyes of those who had come to see her wed lingered and feasted on her. They measured her, peeling back the layers of silk and skin, stripping her to the bone and finding her lacking.

_You were as white as a corpse, _Cersei would later tell her. _Jaime was ready to catch you, he said he was sure you'd faint._

Robert had been hale and hearty enough for the both of them, though. She had whispered her vows to him and he had boomed back at her. A mummer's farce, those vows of eternal constancy were. Robert had his own rooms at Chataya's, in the years to come he would bed half of her ladies-in-waiting. And she... well, Varys saw to it that she was generously supplied with the silver-haired, lilac-eyed love-slaves of Lys. If he found it passing strange that she favoured them best, those pale shadows of the man she claimed had raped her, he kept it to himself.

Eddard had stripped off her maiden's cloak because Father and Brandon were dead. They were as dead as though she had killed them herself, fanning the flames under Father and hanging the noose around Brandon's neck. No, they would tell her, Ned and Robert, it had not been her, it had been Aerys... but she knew better. They loved her. Of course they would lie to her.

_My father's colours, _she'd thought, staring at the puddle of white-and-grey silk at her feet. "Smile," Robert had whispered to her as he draped his black-and-gold cloak about her shoulders. "I have a surprise for you."

The surprise had turned out to be Rhaegar Targaryen's tarred head, of course. In life, she had not recognized it at first and Robert had been forced to explain. In the dream, the head was still fresh, tendrils of silver-gold hair floating about it. But the mouth had dripped blood and the eyes had been torn out and in their place, maggots swarmed out, crawling down his sculpted face, his beautiful face.

_I took my warmhammer and I smashed into his damn chest, I smashed right through and I heard the ribs cracking and he screamed, Lyanna, it was the sweetest sound. He screamed out and I smashed again and all the time I was only thinking of you, what he'd done to you and I laughed, I laughed..._

And then she had woken up.

She woke up sweating, as though from a fever, and stripped off the covers. There were two little mounds in her bed and it was a while before she could remember that those were her children, three-year-old Alcuin and five-year-old Dagna. She saw precious little of them these days and so she had taken to having them sleep with her. Robert never shared her bed when she was with child.

"Gods be good," she whispered, kissing their foreheads and making the sign to ward off the Evil Eye over them. Elia's babes had been a prince and a princess, younger than her own little ones when the Lannisters came for them. _Lannisters and winter and the White Walkers, _she thought as she rang for her maids. _Who will promise me that Dagna will never be slaughtered under Robert's bed, as Rhaenys was under Rhaegar's? How will I keep Alcuin safe in my arms when Aegon was not safe in Elia's? _

It was the day of the tourney, held in honour of their unborn child and funded by the gold of Highgarden. _Olenna Redwyne's granddaughter has come to court, _she thought grimly as she stepped into the outer robe of white lawn and the kirtle of soft blue silk. _This tourney will not come without a price. _

The maids combed her hair with a spear from a champion of the fighting pits of Meeren - it was said to bring luck and of late, she had felt the need for luck. _You are as ignorant as a bogwoman with your follies and your superstitions, _Father used to say but Father was dead, wasn't he? _He would have done better with some luck on his side too..._

They brought out the necklace of interlaced sapphires and emeralds for her, on a bed of wine-red velvet. It had been Shiera Seastar's once but after she had borne no children, had passed down the line of the Targaryen Queens. The Usurper had taken the Iron Throne and his queen had taken the enchantress's necklace. It was said that her mother, Selenei of Lys had cast her spells on those jewels, charms to keep the wearer young and beautiful forever. Lyanna took a peek at her strained, white face in the mirror and decided that all the magic had gone out of it.

"Lyanna." It was Ser Barristan who had kept vigil outside her door that night. She smiled in answer - of all the men she knew in the Red Keep, this was the one she trusted the most. Jon loved Robert and he loved Robert's children - but her, no.

_Barristan will always need a king to protect, _Rhaegar had once told her. "Such a long face?" he said lightly.

"I've always had a long face," she told him. "When I was a little girl at Winterfell, my brothers used to call me 'Lya Longface'."

He fell into step behind her. "There's something I could show you that would make you smile."

"What is it?"

"A surprise." He turned down a flight of stairs, letting her trail after him. She loved surprises. Years of knowing better had failed to diminish her childish enthusiasm for them.

A narrow stone balcony, red-and-purple with tangled vines in flower, overlooked a private court. She peeked down and saw Robert and Bran sparring, the father with his warhammer, the son with his sword. _Robert be careful. You might hurt him, _she itched to say but she thought better of it. Bran was twelve, in a few years he would be a man grown. _It's good that Robert's paying attention to him, _she reminded herself, wincing as her husband's warhammer sliced through the air, as Bran ducked just in time. _He could care less about all the others... it's only that Bran's the one big enough to really be taught to fight that he cares at all. _

The boy stumbled and fell flat on his back. "I yield!" he yelled quickly and laughing, Robert reached down to help him back to his feet.

"That's the disadvantage of a sword," Robert was telling him, as Bran poured a pitcher of water over his head. "A warhammer, that's what counts, I taught the Targaryen that on the Trident when I-"

"Mother!" Bran yelled, spotting her. He waved madly and laughing, she waved back at him too. "Mother, did you see me? Did you see how good I was, I _almost _knocked Father out-"

"-And in a few years you'll truly be knocking Father out," Robert said indulgently, ruffling his hair. They were mirrors of eachother, when you looked at the boy you could see what the man had once been.

_Is this what Jon sees when he looks at my boys? _she thought, feeling like crying. _Is that what Catelyn Tully sees when she looks at Ned and then at my boy? _

"Your mother's not interested," Robert said, cutting short Bran's prattle. "She's always had a penchant for swords, eh Lyanna? Big, hefty, shiny things. All women like flashy things, best you don't fall into that trap, Bran, when your sweetling wants you to parade around with a pretty sword. A sword might _look _nice but when it comes to business, your warhammer-"

"Brandon taught me to love swords."

Bran made an 'O' with his mouth and abruptly, Robert shut up. A handkerchief materialized and she took it from Ser Barristan - she had not realized that she had been crying. _Child-bearing, _she thought furiously. _It addles a woman's brains... I could have drowned this one in my belly with moon tea, as Lysa said I should. Why didn't I? _

_Because you wanted a boy named Jon, _she remembered. _A boy with winter in his face._

"Mother," Bran said. "Mother, can I ride in the tourney today? I'm big enough-"

"No," she barked. Had he been hoping to catch her unawares? _First Alcuin wants a sword, now Bran wants to ride in a tourney. Will Joff be wanting an army next? _"No, of course not."

"Why?" Bran wailed. "I'm big enough, Lord Arryn said Father rode in a tourney when he was my age and-"

She stared at him incredulously. "You're _twelve,_" she said. "Gods bless you, when your Father rode in the Vale he did not contend with the greatest knights in the Seven Kingdoms. And he was no prince, not heir to-"

"I have three brothers," Bran said sulkily. "Maybe I'll have another one and-"

She wanted to slap him. "And having three brothers gives you the right to cripple yourself?" she hissed, leaning forwards. "Or get yourself killed when you're just a little boy?"

"I wouldn't get myself killed or crippled," he explained patiently, as though she was overreacting. "I'm just saying, if you're worried that I shouldn't ride because I'm a prince-"

"Brandon," Robert intoned. "Listen to your mother."

She stared at him. Twelve years old and he thought he was big enough to ride against grown men - and women too, seeing that Brienne would try her hand today. _You were fourteen when you rode at Harrenhal, _she remembered. _You thought you were plenty big enough - can you blame him? _She had been taller then than Bran was now, but he was brawnier, better trained, stronger. He was nearly as good a rider as she'd been too, but... no. No, he was still a little boy. Four or five years would be time enough.

"We hold with no such folly in the north," she told him icily. "War is no game and I count a tourney one of the foulest bloodsports. Your uncles would too."

"My northern uncles," Bran corrected her, frowning. "Uncle Renly wouldn't-"

_Uncle Renly who'd be like as not to take your throne, _she thought, her temper rising. "Brandon, if I hear one more word out of you-"

"There's no fun in the north!" Bran yelled back at her, his eyes flashing. "I don't want to go to Winterfell, I won't, I tell you, you said my place was at the heart of the realm, well I'll-"

"Brandon." Robert touched his shoulder and the boy quietened, though there was still a look in his face that Lyanna did not like. "I will not have you speak so to your mother - she knows better than a green boy. Go to your room."

"But I-"

"Now." Robert's voice was seldom so sharp when he spoke to his firstborn son. "The king commands it. Ser Barristan, escort my son to his chambers and see that he is ready in good time for the tourney." Ser Barristan beckoned and pouting, Brandon left the court.

"Lady wife." He looked up at her. "You look awful."

"Lord husband." She studied him. "Would that I might say the same of you." Drink had puffed his face and his waist had thickened and swelled, but he had weathered the years considerably better than she had. He had never drunk to excess - she and Jon had seen to that. He still trained on the courts and now when his sycophants called him 'stately', they weren't too far off the mark. He had never taxed his brain with much thought and so his hair was still as black as his sons', while hers was lined with grey.

"You could do something about your hair," he said plaintively. "I don't care what you say about white hair being dignified. And that necklace of yours - isn't it supposed to keep you beautiful?"

"It is," she allowed. "But it only works on Targaryens." _And a true Targaryen queen would be beautiful enough, necklace or no necklace. _"The spell won't hold on an unsurper's queen." His lip curled, he did not like that. He did not like to remember that his throne was built on children's corpses, his crown sealed with a better man's blood. How she enjoyed that look on his face, the way it turned slowly purple...

"Damn you, woman-"

A good general knew the art of an orderly retreat. She spread her hands out conciliatingly and said, "Peace. You don't need me to be beautiful. You only need me to sit on your council, you only need me for the children."

"Fat lot of good you are as a mother," he snapped.

_I know, _she thought, feeling a twinge of guilt. _They love Cersei and Renly more than they do me, their own mother..._

"Your mothering's made Bran soft," he said.

"He's twelve," she protested. "Would you have me let him ride in the tourney?"

"When I was twelve, I'd-"

She ticked them off on her fingers. "Been champion of the melee, slain the giants of the hill clans as you rode at Jon's side, survived a snowstorm, had your first woman - yes, anything else, my puissant warrior?" She gave him a hard look. "Bran is heir to the throne. I agree that he's no child but I'd rather that he spent his hours sitting on the councils, than in playing with lances. What use are lances to a king?"

"When he leads armies-"

"No." She said it flatly and as she said it, she thought of another prince who had once led an army. "No, he will not lead an army. His place is not at the head of an army, like some common soldier, it's at the heart of the realm. His life is worth more than that."

"He's my son."

She lost her temper. "And a precious father you've been!" she snarled. "You'd turn him into some whoring, wine-sodden, berserk, uncouth boar like you if I let you, wouldn't you? You won a throne-" _over a better man_. "But who's kept it for you over these years? Jon, that's who." _And me_. _But you'd laugh and say a woman's only good for one thing, if I told you, wouldn't you? _"You've had good counsellors, but what's to say that Bran will have the same luck? In the north, we hold that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. The man who sits the throne should pass the judgment."

She named Robert's son for her brother, for remembrance, as a reminder. She'd pictured him growing up to be like Brandon, but he's turned out to be southron through and through. _That will change when we go to Winterfell - Ned and Ben, his true uncles who love him so well, will be there and in time he will forget that he ever doted on Renly. _

"Fuck you northerners." His voice was a rumble. "If I let you have your way, you'd have him hacking off heads now, wouldn't you?"

She thought about it. "Yes," she said steadily. "If he's old enough to want to play at the games of war, he's old enough to take a man's life. It's time he knew how it was done."

"Such a tender, loving mother." All the anger had gone out of him now, as quick as summer lightning over the sea, and he seemed amused now. He was like that. _Was Rhaegar ever angry? He was so very gentle, but he must have had his times... _"I suppose you're right about that though. If he's had his first woman, it's time he took-"

"_What_?"

"Lyanna, for pity's sake, if you're going to faint don't do it in front of a balcony."

She clutched the railings and stared at him incredulously. "Do you mean to tell me that-"

He scuffed his feet, looking sheepish. "I was going to wait," he said plaintively. "For his thirteenth nameday, see. It's in two moon's turns so I thought it would be a nice present for him, he'd be curious and I thought it best if his father helped him along the path, so's to speak... Jon was never much use where women were concerned and I had a few rough patches with poxy whores. But Bran's a prince like you said and we gave him the princeliest time a prince could want, a nice, clean place, the prettiest, youngest girls you could want, really, Lyanna don't pull that face."

"Who's we?"

"Renly helped. He's closer to the boy than I thought and he said golden hair and green eye and so we went to Chataya's and there was this fresh young thing, Dancy, I think she was called_. _Anyway, we were going to wait but then you'll be taking the children to Winterfell this month and north of the Neck you can't buy a good woman for gold so..." He trailed off.

She rubbed her head. The world was spinning too fast. "Perhaps Jon did have a point when he said we'd do best to betroth the boy soon." _And perhaps we might have taken Margaery. Renly bought the girl and the swords of Highgarden - curse me for a fool for not seeing it earlier.  
><em>

Robert waved a hand negligently. "Ah, let him marry for love."

She stared at him. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me. Let him marry for love." His eyes turned misty and he looked more gormless than ever. "As I married you for love."

"You most certainly did not. As I recall it, Father wrote to you when you were sixteen and you wanted _so_ to be Ned's brother that you'd have taken me if I was scarred and bearded like Selyse Florent."

"Well, yes," he admitted. "Ned was always more of a brother to me than Stannis and Renly. But I meant after the war, after I took you to wife-"

"You couldn't just have abandoned me then," she pointed out shrewdly. "It would have been the height of absurdity - fighting a war for a woman and then sending her back home."

He looked uneasy. "I never told you, did I?" Without waiting for an answer, he explained. "Jon said I'd do better to take Cersei. On the one side, he said, I could have the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms, the gold of Casterly Rock and Lord Tywin's friendship."

She wrapped her arms about herself, shivering. _Cersei as queen. And what would become of me? _"And on the other side was the deflowered girl, the damaged goods."

He flashed her a dazzling smile. "Love tipped the scales, sweetling."

She had to laugh at the absurdity of it. Robert did not love her. He loved the idea of her, Ned's little sister, as wild and sweet and desirable as a white hart. A trophy. "Speaking of love," she said, "Renly and his roses came back last night. Did you catch a glimpse of his little bride?"

He blushed. So he had.

"She's as beautiful as the dawn isn't she?" _This is the way it should be done, _she decided. _I should have confronted you like this, before you took Cersei to your bed. _"Her lady grandmother and Renly will have coached her. They'll send her to your bed before the month is up."

"Lyanna-"

"She's a pretty girl. Fine jewels and new gowns will become her and I do not begrudge her if she asks you for them," she said steadily. "But if you truly love me, as you say, you will give her nothing more than gems. No royal charters, no deeds, no promises, no matter how trivial they might seem to you." She looked at him steadily. "Do I have your word?"

He flinched. "I never-"

"Do I have your word?"

He threw up his hands. "Damn you woman, yes," he snapped. "Curse all northern women for harpies."

_And curse all southron men for lechers. _She smiled at him. "Oh, and one more thing. Cersei gave you a girl and there's naught to be done about that. But should Margaery whelp, you'll have the babe drowned with moon tea, understand? Your by-blows are one thing but I will not face your great bastards, I will not have your brothers' wives flaunting them in my face and smiling their sickly-sweet smiles." Without waiting for an answer, she swept away.

_This, _she thought absently. _Is how a queen should act. She must not think of herself, she must endure all insults to her person if they are to the good of her kingdom. She must rise above it all, in the name of the greater good. Rhaegar would have been the first to tell me so. _If that was so, then why did she feel so cold?

* * *

><p><em>A tall lord with copper skin and silver-gold hair stood beneath the banner of a fiery stallion, a burning city behind him.<em>

**A Clash of Kings**

* * *

><p>When she entered, the council chambers were empty save for the man who stood by the window. He turned at the sound of her footsteps and a smile like summer broke out over his face.<p>

"Auntie crone!" he sang and with three great strides he was at her side, holding her close and hugging her.

_I can see why the children love him so. _Renly was a scoundrel and a rogue, a liar and a traitor-in-the-bud. He would come for her children's throats when Robert was dead, but all the same he was as much an enchantor as Selenei of Lys had been. He had only to stoop to kiss her cheeks and resentment and mistrust fell from her shoulders, like a winter's cloak ill-suited to the warmth of summer. When she looked up into his face, she saw the laughing boy of eight he had been when she'd first met him. The boy who'd commented that she wasn't too bad-looking, but compared to Lady Cersei she was as haggard as his Estermont great-aunts. When she'd heard, she'd given him permission to call her 'Auntie crone' and 'Auntie crone' was what he would call her to the end of his days.

She rubbed the fabric of the cloak the draped his shoulders. Forest-green velvet, as soft as sin. "Beautiful," she whispered. Everything about Renly was beautiful - Robert had been like him, but coarser. "You'll have to send me the pattern so I can have one made for Robert and the boys."

"Thank you." He studied her face. "You look awful," he said, drawing out a chair for her. "Has Robert been whipping you again?"

"No more than I deserve," she said as he poured a cup of wine for her. "It's not him - it's the baby." _Well no, it's not. It's just ugly old me. _"You'll know, soon enough, when you get Margaery with child." She gulped the wine down, Arbour gold that warmed her pleasantly. "I'll never forgive you for not inviting me to your wedding."

He took the chair opposite her as the other members of the small council began to filter in. "Highgarden's over a hundred leagues from King's Landing," he pointed out. "And I knew you'd not leave the heart of the realm for a mere wedding when you haven't even left it to see your own home for seven years."

Robert waddled in, with his breakfast. When he saw her reproachful look he grimaced as though to say that it was her fault that the council was being called so early that he had not yet had time to eat. She had skipped breakfast, herself.

When all had settled and Robert had the grace to swallow down the last of his blood-pie, Jon cleared his throat. "Varys," he said, inclining his head to the eunuch, "tells me that Daenerys Targaryen has been delievered of a healthy child. A son who has been named Rhaego."

The storm that erupted on Lyanna's head made her shrink back. Robert slammed the tabletop with his fist, the noise rippling through the room like thunder. She had no doubt that if Jon had not been there to restrain him, his fist would have met her face. "Damn you!" he bellowed, his face turning an alarming shade of purple. She gripped her hands under the table and tried not to flinch when he glared at her. "Damn you, this is what comes of listening to a woman, a fool woman-"

"-And a man too." Jon's voice was as cold as the snow that capped the high peaks of the Vale. "Her Grace was not alone in her plea that clemency be granted to Daenerys Targaryen. Ser Barristan and I seconded it."

_The whore is pregnant. I will see her dead! _She bit her lip and looked down, not daring to meet his eyes.

"And this is what has come of it! A son, do you hear me, a son?" He stood up and walked around the table until he was standing next to her. "Look at me, woman," he snarled and she was forced to lift her head, to look into the mad loathing in his eyes. _The demon of the Trident, they called him. Did you fear him, Rhaegar, did you fear him as I do now? _"Clemency," he said. "You asked for clemency, my lady. Perhaps the whore will grant your sons clemency when she lands on our shores."

She found her voice. "Your sons as much as mine," she said steadily. "You found no clemency for Elia's children." Justice, she thought vaguely, was never even-handed. Children paid for the sins of their fathers. She looked at Lord Tywin's face - it was like the stone masks they lay over the dead, in Dorne.

"Robert." It was Jon. "A child has been born, a son as you forsaw. What of it? The Narrow Sea yet lies betwixt us and the Dothraki savages."

"And I forsee that this _child_ will grow to be the damnation of us all! I forsee that he'll come to claim his kingdom with thousands of those _savages_! I forsee that when the Dothraki are through, they'll leave our cities smoking as they rape and pillage the land! What say you, my lords?"

"Clemency was a mistake," Renly agreed, his eyes glittering. "The Beggar King is dead but his sister's son will claim his throne one day."

Littlefinger's voice was light, conversational. "They found a most innovative way to kill Viserys Targaryen. Perhaps they will be kind enough to dispose of dear little Rhaego in the same way."

Lord Tywin's voice was measured. "The father commands the greatest _khalasar_ of the grasslands," he said. "Perhaps it would have been better had we acted as Your Grace had suggested. If we had cut down the child when he was still in his mother's womb-"

"We would have been guilty of the most heinous of crimes," Barristan said steadily. "There is honour in facing an enemy on the battlefield, but none in killing him in his mother's womb. I have stood with Her Grace and Lord Arryn on this matter, and I will continue do so."

Littlefinger examined his little fingers. "Honour. Clemency. I'm sure that will be of much comfort to the mothers when the children are ripped from their arms and impaled on Dothraki spears, to know that their queen pleaded for clemency."

She let them quibble over words. Anything she said now would only inflame Robert's temper. Daenerys Stormborn, she had been named. Rhaegar's sister. She had once suggested that they might bring the children back - Viserys might be sent to the Wall, fire and ice, Rhaegar would have wanted that. Daenerys might be wed to Bran - it would truly cement the legitimacy of his rule. Robert had looked at her with frosty blue eyes and said that he wondered at her charity. He had asked her how she could bear the idea of marrying her son to the sister of the man who had raped her, the daughter of the man who had murdered her father and brother.

That had put an end to the matter.

Jon was speaking now, his voice calm and measured. He would bring to Robert to hand, he was more than a father to him. And Robert, grumbling, grunting, grimacing Robert, would listen to him. _It will come hard to Robert when Jon's time comes, _she thought, glancing at the man's white hair and tired face. _He's older than Barristan, seventy if he is a day - how many years does he have left? It will come hard to me too when Jon dies... who will Robert appoint as his Hand? _

Jon bought more time for Rhaegar's nephew and Robert leaned back in his seat and directed a look of purest loathing at her. "Women," he muttered, although she had not said a word. That was the way of the world, she'd found out. The woman would be the first one to be blamed.

Lord Tywin was looking at her. "On the happy occassion of Her Grace's pregnancy," he said. "I would like to deliever a present."

She liked surprises but Lord Tywin's surprises had a way of turning... nasty. "That is kind of you, my lord," she said uncertainly.

Lord Tywin nodded and snapped his fingers. The great iron-bound doors opened and two men in Lannister crimson appeared, bearing a bronze shield. A shield with a man's tarred head on it. And all at once she was seventeen again, back in the sept, wrapped in Robert's colours and looking down at Rhaegar's head. She shivered but she forced her voice to be strong. "And what is the meaning of this?" she asked icily. "My lord, if I had prayed for a miscarriage I would have thanked you for your present."

He favoured her with something less than a smile. "Ser Gregor Clegane's head," he said quietly. "I had thought that it might please you."

She studied the head. It was unrecognizable. Most tarred heads were. Still, it was rather large, it might meet the description... "Heads mean nothing and less," she said quietly. "Bring me a body."

"The body, most unfortunately, had been cast to the dogs."

"A dog for the dogs," Renly chuckled.

"Ser Ilyn will vouch for his head though," Lord Tywin said. "As will I. Do you doubt my word, Your Grace?"

She was hemmed in on all sides. A quick glance at Jon's face told her that this was not the time to voice her doubts. "Of course not," she said. "Your honour is well-known throughout the Seven Kingdoms, my lord." _The honour of a butcherer of children._ She gestured to the head, stomach roiling. "Justice has been served, no more, no less. I do not take this for a present, though I do thank you for serving the king's justice so swiftly." It had not been swift at all - it had been thirteen years in the brewing. "This must be sent to Dorne." _Gouty Doran will be grateful, but Oberyn will laugh in our faces. He will want a body to go with the head. _

"And so it shall," Jon promised her. "Dorne, where Prince Doran and his fair heiress, the Princess Arianne, reside." She could see the plot forming in his mind - Arianne Martell was ten years older than Bran but even so... there was much to be said for the plan. The spears of Dorne against the swords of Highgarden, the Martells pitted against their rivals, the Tyrells. She would consider it.

"Well then," Robert said, rising to his feet. "That's that, then. Now we can get on to the bloody tourney, wine and wenches..." Without a second glance at her, he stalked out of the council room and the small council began to disband.

"Lyanna." Jon touched her arm gently. "I was hoping that you might walk with me."

He was so very gallant. Sometimes he frightened her as much as Robert. _I am like the bear tied to the stake, hemmed in by the dogs, _she thought, glancing at Renly who was cracking a joke with Littlefinger, at Lord Tywin who spoke in a low voice to Maester Pycelle. _They will come for my children as they sleep. _She shivered - this would not do. This was the path to madness, that Aerys had once walked. _Renly must have poisoned my wine. _

"Yes, of course," she said sweetly, taking his arm. "I would love nothing better." And pasting a smile on her face, she let him lead her away.

* * *

><p>"When you know what passions rule a man then he is yours. Tell me, Lyanna, what do you think rules Lord Tywin?"<p>

That was an easy one. "Pride."

"Littlefinger?"

"Love," she said, smiling. "Littlefinger loves Littlefinger." _And the sparkle of golden dragons. And the colour of chaos._

He studied her. "What rules you, child? Is it fear? Or guilt, remorse?"

_Remembrance. _"I could tell you," she teased him. "But then I'd have to kill you." That was the catchphrase of the season - the whole court was in love with a new playwright and his wit and one-liners spiced their conversations.

"So you've learnt the rules of the game," he said dryly. "I remember when I first saw you - you weren't quite seventeen then, were you? A little corpse bride who would run crying to her brother. I offered Cersei to Robert but he wouldn't hear of it and I always wondered why... well, he had the right of it, I see now."

She beamed. "Having Cersei as queen would be like setting wildfire to a dry tree."

"She would have wrought more ill than you have good," he agreed. "But it's not a game, child." His face hardened. "You and Renly and Littlefinger, you think you're playing a game, don't you? That it's all about how well you know the rules, how clever your moves are, how quick - it's not a game, not for a moment." His grip on her arm tightened. "It's lives you're playing with. You knew that once, but you seem to have forgotten. You learnt it in the north, all to forget it in the south. These conspiracies, these intrigues, what do you think you achieve by them? Would you turn your allies into your enemies by your own folly?"

Under his gaze, she blushed guiltily. "Renly and Littlefinger are no allies of mine," she said stiffly. "You know that, Jon. Renly has always thought overmuch of himself and when Robert is gone, he'll move against my children. And Littlefinger - well I'd have to be more foolish than you think me to put my faith in him."

He did not reprimand her. "I meant Lord Tywin."

She pressed her lips together. "He is no ally of mine." Ned had known the Lannisters for oathbreakers and traitors. He had warned her.

"He won't be if you continue to insult him as you did today," Jon pointed out shrewdly. "What did you hope to achieve by implying that his word was false, that the head he offered to you was not Clegane's?"

"What proof do we have that it _was _Clegane's?"

"His word. The word of an honourable lord."

_The word of a butcherer of children. The word of the Kingslayer's father. _"If I believed every man's word-" she said heatedly.

He threw her a withering look. "And this is what comes of dealing with a woman," he said softly. "Oh spare me your histrionics," he snapped when she opened her mouth in protest. "You've done good work, I will never deny that you have not. You have your silvercloaks and your orphanages, your schools and the strength you've raised at the Wall. Robert was in the right when he raised you to the small council. No king since the first Jaehaerys ever raised his queen to such an honour." His smile was warmer now. "Perhaps you are not so far from Alysanne after all."

They walked in silence for a while, past lords and ladies who cleared a path for them and bowed deeply. She liked this homage, though Ned would have called it vain. _The years in the south have ruined me._ It would be good to go back home, back to Winterfell where she could dress in breeches and splash in mud puddles if she wanted. She could bake batches of lemon pies and build snow-castles with her children.

"How old are you?"

She blushed as she said, "Thirty."

"A child," he said dismissively before she could point out that she'd borne seven of those. "I have more than twice as many. When your father was still a babe in swaddling cloths, I bent spear against the mountain clans. The gods will give you more wisdom when they give you more years. I have faith in you."

He had never praised her so. She had always been under the impression that he misliked her. "You do?" she asked incredulously.

"I hope my faith will not be misplaced," he said amiably. "When I am gone, it will be you ruling the kingdom. You and Robert have had your spats but when the time comes, he will look to you. No, spare me your lamentations - you will be among the first to rejoice when the reins of power pass to you, I know you well enough."

"I am not so bloodthirsty."

"It is not bloodthirsty to desire an old man's death. _Valar morghulis_ - you have been studying Valyrian, tell me what it means, child."

"All men must die," she said quietly. She had been studying Valyrian for a year but she had heard those words before. Rhaegar had whispered them in her ear when she had wept and begged him to take her with him. Arthur had said them the day before her child was born, the day before Ned came. _The day Rhaegar made me promise. The day I made Arthur promise. _"Men have lived to a hundred," she said, trying to make light of the matter. "You are too good for the gods to take you away from us so soon."

"The gods take only those who are good," he said absently. He was right. "It is testimony to my sins that they have let me live so long. I would have liked to see Robert's children wed, to hold their children's children but it will not be." There was a dreadful finality about those words. She wondered why he cared more about Robert's children than his own. "And you, girl," he said sharply, "I trust you're not thinking of stealing my Hand's badge?"

"I'd rather be the power behind the throne," she said demurely.

"And who's to be the power on the throne while Robert makes merry, I wonder?" He frowned at her. "Lord Tywin, that's who. You'll see to it that Lord Tywin's made Hand - he's the only man I'd want stepping into my shoes. He is hard, yes, but he will be just and your sons will be needing his friendship. Marry the girls to his nephews, the one's who'll inherit Casterly Rock. The seat of power will not pass to the Imp nor to Cersei's whelps, I'll wager. I won't have you play the girl and cast him off because you don't like him."

"Robert might want someone else." She'd make sure that he wanted someone else.

"He'll want your brother," he said bluntly. "Ned's a good lad and I love him more than my own son, if truth be told. But he's a lad still, there's no skirting around that. He hasn't Tywin's years or his swords or his experience and what's more, his place is in the north." His eyes narrowed. "And if it's Ned you coax Robert into choosing, I'll hound you from the grave."

She laughed and his face became kinder. Gently, like a father, he touched her face. "The little corpse bride," he said. "How you've grown up. Once you'd tremble and fall to weeping when you heard Rhaegar Targaryen's name spoken. And now you have it in you to stand up to any man in the realm - me, Lord Tywin, Robert... Is he kind to you, child?"

The question caught her unawares. Was Robert kind to her? Some days he made her laugh and some nights, he made her cry. He was the father of her children but he had it in him to kill her firstborn. He listened to her and then dismissed her as nothing but a woman. She hardly knew the answer herself. "It's a woman's lot," she simply said. "He gave me a crown and that's all I ever wanted."

"Smile," he simply said. "You look sweeter when you smile. Smile and remember that bad as it, it can always get worse."

Well. That was consoling.

* * *

><p>Jaime escorted her to her place in the stands. "You look-"<p>

"Awful, I know," she admitted. "Everyone's been telling me. I'll wager you a groat the Tyrells are praying I'll die in childbed this time - they sent Margaery to Renly's bed but she's like to be a maid."

"You might let a man finish," he said, nonplussed. "I only meant to say that you reminded me of someone."

"Rhaella?" she asked, settling down next to Cersei.

He gave her a brief smile. "No. Aerys."

In contrast to Lyanna wearing white, Cersei was all in black. Stannis was still sulking at Dragonstone - she knew Jon had had a strange letter from him and Cersei said he was memorizing family trees and pouring through books of lineages. Today, her sunlit hair fell in a fashionable tumble to her naked white shoulders. Half the young ladies of the court, including Lyanna's elder daughter, had imitated her hairstyle - though Margaery wore her hair like Lyanna. With her crimson lips and brilliant eyes, Cersei was as beautiful as a maid of sixteen. A pity that Robert had eyes only for Renly's rose-bride.

Ser Loras was riding down the length of the lists, throwing white roses to all the maidens. For Princess Daeryssa, Lyanna's elder daughter, he had a red rose. "How sweetly she blushes," Cersei said idly. "The sister snares the father and the brother snares the daughter."

"I thought Daeryssa doted upon Robert's squire," Lyanna said, surprised. "That cousin of yours, Lancel?"

Cersei laughed. "Oh sweetling, you are far behind the times. That was last month - now all the girls are wet for Loras."

"I am a poor mother to know nothing of my daughters," Lyanna said. She studied the Knight of the Flowers. "Too girlish."

"You are a poorer judge of beauty than you are a mother," Cersei said. "I count him the third handsomest man alive, now. And if he would look beyond the men he would find my bed most warm."

"The first will be your brother," Lyanna said. "But who do you call the second?"

Cersei pointed to a tall young man, mounted on a prancing blood-mare. His hair was the same bright silver as his armour and as he rode down the lists, armour and hair flashed in the sun. For one heartstopping moment she thought it was someone she knew. "The Bastard of Driftmark," Cersei said lazily. "Aurane Waters - I see you find him as dashing as I do."

She turned her face away grimly. "He wears a Targaryen face. I find him loathsome."

Cersei had the grace to blush. "Forgive me, dear friend," she said, laying a gentle hand on Lyanna's shoulder. "I ought to have been more tactful. But the question still remains - who do you find to be the handsomest man at court?"

"Renly," she lied, knowing that the answer would please Robert if he came to know. "He looks so very like Robert." But her eyes lingered on Aurane Waters and when the Mystery Knight, clad in golden armour and bearing the white-hart shield passed by, she did not spare him a glance.

"Our Mystery Knight rides well," Cersei said dryly, as he won a bout against Ser Hugh of the Vale, Jon's last squire. "A pity that he seems so small of stature."

_The Knight of the Laughing Tree_... _he rides so well. A pity that he seems so small of stature. _"Bran," she said slowly, glancing over to where her sons sat. She could only see the backs of their heads, for they were seated below her. "Bran, come here."

The boys squirmed and wriggled in their seats and finally Joff and Gendry turned around. "I'm sorry, my lady, truly I am," Gendry said, looking abashed. He was only a few months younger than Bran and when they were dressed alike, it was hard to tell them apart. "Bran ordered me and I couldn't say a thing, he said he'd send me to the dungeons if I didn't..."

Robert stopped flirting with Margaery long enough to lean over and put an arm on her shoulder. "Don't you fuss over the boy," he hissed and she could tell he was still seething over Daenerys Targaryen. Robert had a positive mania where the Targaryens were concerned. "I let him, I'll accept responsibility for him."

She shook him off and pursed her lips. "I hope you'll accept the responsibility when they lay his corpse before you."

"Lyanna," Cersei began. "A boy must have his sport-"

"Would you say that if it was _your _son riding down there?" she asked fiercely and after that Cersei was silent.

She chewed her lips until they bled, but her fears proved baseless. The Mystery Knight rode against two men and yet there was naught to suggest that the defeated knights had the faintest inkling that they had lost to the crown prince. Robert did not give it away, though he beamed and ignored Margaery. Cersei applauded him and whispered that she remembered another crown prince who had rode as well.

_He is my son as much as Robert's, _she thought as the name of his fourth opponent was called out. _So wild, so wilful. _She had been a fourteen-year-old girl. He was a twelve-year-old boy. There was no difference. This time he was to ride against Brienne of Tarth and she beckoned the woman forwards before the match began.

"For pity's sake, be gentle on him," she whispered. "That's Bran."

Brienne's homely face registered alarm.

Robert overheard. "But not too gentle," he insisted. "Knock him off his horse if you have to. The boy didn't put in his name for a game - he put it in because he wanted to be tested. He's not a babe to be coddled by his mother - give it to him hard, give it to him fair, that's all I want."

Lyanna winked at Brienne. "Yes, Your Grace," Brienne said, bowing from the saddle. On two legs she stood as tall as Robert. On four legs she towered over them all. Cersei found her a delight. "I'll knock him off his horse."

And she proceeded to do just that.

* * *

><p>"You're a fool."<p>

Bran winced as the compresses were put on his head. "I know, Mother," he said humbly.

"I'm so proud of you."

He grinned. "I know that too. What did Father say? Was he-"

"Prouder than words can say," she said. _He'd probably buy you a brothel right now, if I let him. _"He wanted to come but I told him to stay, lest they all find out who the gallant Mystery Knight was." She stroked his cheek. "And the melee begins soon, in any case. He'll be riding there."

Bran curled up closer to her. Clearly he was too tired to even beg to see the melee. "I don't like warhammers," he mumbled. "I like swords just like you and Uncle Brandon used to, though I pretend I like warhammers because it pleases Father. And I'm sorry about what I said about the north."

_Now if only you said you were sorry about loving your Uncle Renly more than you do your Uncle Ned and your Uncle Ben I'd be perfectly content. _"It's all forgiven, love."

"Mother." His voice was hesitant. "Will you always forgive me?"

"What did you-"

"Nothing!" he protested. "I didn't do anything - well, not much really, but still even if I do. Something really bad I mean, like-like say, killing someone. Not in a war or anything but just if I lost my temper and-"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," she said amiably. "I doubt you'll be going around killing people anytime soon." He had a temper, true, he'd once whipped Gendry but there... it was only a boy's high spirits. He was her blood, Robert's blood - she could not believe that he would do such a thing.

They sat in the darkened tent together and presently he fell asleep, his head on her lap. Just like old times. The world span too fast but at times like this, she could pretend that it stayed still. She could pretend that she was a girl back at Winterfell, before Rhaegar, before Robert, and it was her little brother, not her son, who slept with his head in her lap. She could pretend that the baby she carried she was the first one, the one she'd given away.

_The world does not spin so fast at all, _she thought, falling into a reverie in which no promises, nor remembrances figured. And outside the walls of the tent, Robert cut through a swathe of men as he laughed and Thoros lit his twin blades. Cersei blew kisses to her brother and Daeryssa's favour was wrapped around Ser Loras' arm. And the red woman, whom no one knew, watched it all and a strange smile twisted her face while the prince slept like a babe, on his mother's lap.


	3. Guilt

In her dream, she was back in the crypts.

She had no torch, no lantern to light her way and yet the shadows lurked and sprang, the living children of dark and flickering light. Those were the shadows of giants, of the dead kings of winter. Stone made flesh, stirring in the darkness.

The darkness, it was everywhere, it was everything. It swirled about her, it wrapped itself about her body like a maiden's cloak, about her throat like the hands of the men who would come for her children while she slept. It snagged about her skirts and she stumbled as she tried to flee and fell to her knees like an animal to be butchered. There was life in her yet, she could have risen, she could have run as she had always tried to run from her guilt, but this time was different, this time there was the child in her arms.

Grey eyes or blue, brown hair or black, boy or girl, what did it matter? It was her child.

She could hear the sigh of stone upon stone, as the vaults opened one by one. She heard the steel scrape as they unsheathed their swords and she knew what they came for, her child's blood to pay for her father's. She heard the words, spoken in the tongue of the First Men. _Kinslayer. Murderor. Traitor. _

_No. No. No, it wasn't me! _she wanted to scream, to beg and plead and offer excuses, to lie. _I am not one of you. I am a woman and this is not a child of Winterfell, not your blood. I was never a Stark and neither is this one. I took the dragon, I took the stag, I wore their colours and gave them their heirs. Please. Please. Please! _And relentlessly, the shadows marched onwards.

"Little one."

She knew that voice. "Father!" she screamed, lurching to her feet. "Father, I'm here! Father!" He would save her, he would kiss her and hold her close and take her somewhere warm and safe. _He knows me. He knows me and he still loves me. _

"Sweetling. Springchild." She heard the sigh in his voice and saw the circle of light cast by his dancing lantern before she saw him. _He loves me. _The shadows melted, the shadows fled and she picked up her skirts and ran towards him.

And then he was before her, in grey velvet and white satin with the silver direwolves racing across his cloak. On his white head was a crown, not the twisted circlet of bronze the old Kings of the North had once worn, but a chaplet of roses. Roses as blue as the eyes of the White Walkers.

"Here I am, little one. Come, won't you give your father a kiss?"

As he stepped towards her the petals dripped off from his crown, like rain from the castle eaves and a draught blew them towards her. They brushed her cheeks and tangled in her long hair, as hot as a branding iron and as black as scorched earth. And his skin dripped from his face, like wax dripping from a tallow candle, like the skin of a man roasting in his armour.

"Springchild, won't you give your father a kiss?"

Flesh sloughed off the slender, long-fingered hands that held the lantern and left the bones bare, as white as a virgin-bride's gown. She could smell burnt cloth, burnt hair, burnt flesh.

_His cloak caught first, and then his surcoat, and soon he wore nothing but metal and ashes. Next he would start to cook. The steel of his breastplate turned cherry-red before the end, and his gold melted off his spurs and dripped down into the fire. I stood at the foot of the Iron Throne in my white armor and white cloak, filling my head with thoughts of Cersei..._

"Sweetling, won't you give your father a kiss?" She heard the sigh in his voice as it faded and the draught caught and swirled the ashes through the air.

Sobbing, she fell to her feet and held her child closer to her. It was quiet, so very quiet. _Oh my darling, _she thought. _All I do, I do for you. _She looked down and then she could only scream for she held only ribbons of flayed skin and a face that was a gaping wound of blood and ashes.

_Kinslayer. Murderor. Traitor. _

They were upon her now, the dead kings who cast the shadows of giants. They had done what had needed to be done and now they only circled her, for she was their daughter, blood of their blood. Not so, the child, who was the blood of the dragon, the blood of the stag. _He is not one of us. _

"Take me!" she screamed, knowing that they would not touch her. "Take me and be done with it!"

She was still screaming when Robert slapped her and she awoke wide-eyed and gasping, the taste of ashes lingering in her mouth. He loomed over her, more a giant than a man, and for a moment she thought she was still trapped.

"You wouldn't wake up," he said awkwardly and brushed her cheek gently. "You were screaming and I didn't know what else to do..." He trailed off and looked down helplessly at his large hands.

She felt like she was choking. "Air," she gasped. "Open the windows."

He threw them wide open and the cold air filled the room. A thin stripe of sunshine fell over the bed and she lay back quietly against the pillows, trying to concentrate. She could not, the room was strange, the bed unfamiliar and the man... what had he heard?

"You _do _remember where we are, don't you?"

She thought he meant it as a reproach, for screaming out, and her hackles rose. "If you'd been through half of what I'd been through you wouldn't be quite so quick to condemn me for crying out," she snapped, reaching for her robe. "I felt I was chained there once again and-"

"I only meant-" he began awkwardly and she'd had enough.

"You only meant what, Robert? What?" With two long strides she'd reached her trunk and pulled out a cloak and a serviceable gown. "That I'm weak, that you're tired of me making scenes? Well, my lord, I'm but a woman, a fool woman as you've often said and-"

"It wasn't that. It's only that when someone gets a concussion or something we always ask them what their name is first and then whether they remember where they are. You looked like you could manage the first question so I asked you the second." He shrugged.

"Do I look like I have a concussion?"

"Yes."

She did not deign to reply. The gown was grey and white and that made her angry. Those were the colours of House Stark. What had she to do with House Stark? She was a wife, a mother and she had nothing to do with the house of her fathers and her brothers. Her children would never be Starks.

"So do you remember where we are?"

He was clearly in a persistent mood. "Castle Cerwyn," she snapped. They had reached the castle well after dusk and though Winterfell was but a half-day's ride ahead there was nothing to be done but stop at the castle for the night. Lord Medger Cerwyn, who had plucked summer strawberries with her when she was a little girl, had feasted them richly and Daeryssa had danced with his fourteen-year-old heir, a comely lad named Cley. Robert and she had shared a bed for the night.

"It's early yet, Lyanna - can't be more than the fourth bell. Where are you going?"

She stepped behind a carved screen to change into the gown and cloak. "On an adventure," she said absently, without thinking.

_"It's dark out, Lya. Where are you going?"_

_"Out on an adventure, Ben." _

It was slow work, dressing by herself. She was used to the services of her maids. _What a fine lady I've become, _she thought contemptuously. _I never had my own maid before I was seventeen though Catelyn and Lysa laughed at me for it. _"Did I scream?"

"You woke _me _up. That's a record all on it's own. The last time one of my bedmates woke me up, it was Ned and there were hillmen setting fire to our tent. We were fifteen, sixteen thereabouts and we killed about ten men between us, half-naked as we were..." There was relish in his voice. "Hillmen, there's no unity in them, all you need to do is cut a swathe through them and-"

"I have no interest in cutting a swathe through hillmen. What did I scream?"

He thought about it. "Father, it sounded like. And 'please'."

She breathed more easily.

"It's snowing." There was awe in his voice. "Summer snows, bless me. What is this place like in winter?"

The cold made her shiver and that disgusted her. _I used to suck on icicles and walk barefoot on the snow for a dare, with ne'er a shiver. Winter snows, and this is only summer. What has become of me? _She threw on her scarlet cloak, the colour as deep and rich as that which Melisandre of Asshai wore. It was fastened by a sapphire rose, nestled in a bed of diamond leaves, and that irritated her as well. She loathed roses. She pushed the hood of her cloak over her head so that she would not need to brush her hair. Little Red Riding Hood. The thought made her smile, it was a bedtale Father had told her, not Old Nan, but Father.

_And Little Red Riding Hood ended up in the wolf's stomach didn't she?_

When she emerged from the screen, Robert was leaning on the windowsill in doublet, breeches and cloak. "Go back to bed," she snapped, as though he was her son instead of her husband. He wore riding boots, she noticed, as she hunted for her own boots. Without looking at her, he threw them to her.

"It's pretty isn't it? All this snow?" he said dreamily. "I feel like a singer."

She slipped them on and knotted the laces. "Sweet. Now go back to bed."

"One does not command the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms."

"Unless one is the Lady." She pushed open the door and like a puppy, he trailed at her heels.

"I told you I felt like a singer. I want to go on an adventure with you. Please? Pretty please?"

"Well you're _not._" She couldn't help laughing though as she glanced at his face. He reminded her of Ben. "It's too cold for your thin southron blood, my love. There be wolves in the woods and mayhap they won't take to a southman's smell." 

"You're the one who's shivering," he pointed out.

"Shivering from joy."

"Isn't it _crying _from joy?"

"Same difference."

They'd left the antechamber. It was Ser Jaime who stood attendance at their door. If the sight of them puzzled him, he hid it well. "Robert. My lady. Where to?"

"Adventuring," Robert told him brightly. "We're leaving to hunt snarks and grumkins and rescue a fair damsel or two perhaps."

"_We_ are not." It was bad enough that Robert had not drunk himself into a stupor last night. She would not have Jaime Lannister clinging like slime to the back of her shoes. "I am. And he is. But not you, you're going to stand guard at the door like a good little boy and when Jon comes just tell him we've overslept."

"I have my duties to my liege lord," Jaime said piously. "I would consider it the most heinous of sins if I were to betray them."

She blinked at him. "Kingslayer," she said, drawing the word out. _What is a kingslayer to a kinslayer? _

He shrugged. "That was personal. This is just business."

"We should take him along," Robert said suddenly. "He'll tell Jon if we don't."

This time, both she and Jaime stared incredulously at him. "How _old _are you?" she finally squawked. "_He'll tell Jon if we don't... _honestly, Alcuin has more spunk than you and he's three."

He smiled at her. "You remind me of me and I remind myself of Ned." Before she had time to register what he'd said, he added, "I mean when we were little, I used to sneak out to go adventuring in the dead of the night and Ned would follow to keep me in line... and he'd always mention Jon if I wanted to do anything too rash, like jumping out of the Moon Door, say."

_I'm not rash, _she wanted to say before she realized that she had been on the point of it. She had nothing to protect herself with, Jaime and perhaps Robert might be of assistance. _The world belongs to the oafs. _"Come then," she snapped, sweeping down the stairs. She knew Castle Cerwyn almost as well as she knew Winterfell and it was easy to sneak out and reach the stables at the early hour unnoticed. She passed an alcove, screened from view by a stout pillar and stopped suddenly.

"What?" Robert wanted to know.

She slipped behind the pillar, just barely. She wondered how two people had once fit in there. _We were so young then, so slender. _"I kissed Medger's nephew here when I was ten," she only whispered. "Denys was twelve or thirteen, comely. He would play on the lute and I on the high harp, Father and Lord Cley used to say we made such a pretty pair... but of course nothing came of it, Father wanted a greater marriage for me, a southron alliance for his only daughter."

"Should I be jealous?" He was teasing her.

"Denys fell at Stoney Sept, at the Battle of the Bells. He was not yet twenty." _His blood is on your hands, his and many a good man's and all for what? A wretched girl and her whelp? _She stepped out from behind the pillar.

He took her arm and let her lead him forwards. Presently he said, "There was another Denys who fell that day - Connington slew him. Jon's nephew and heir, they used to call him the darling of the Vale. He was fostered with us, a year older than me. None of us could hold a candle to him on the tilting field and he was as comely as your Denys, I suppose. Chivalrious, that's the word, he was brimming with it - not Ned's kind, more the courtly kind, I'd say. Pretty to look at, charming to talk to... he was in love with this Waynwood girl, as darling as he was. She'd already set to embroidering her wedding gown when Jon called his banners."

His voice was not quite steady as he said, "I was wounded and hiding in Stoney Sept, you know but I managed to cut through six men that day... though Ned won the day for me, in truth. Jon was not there but the least I could do for him was write to him and stand vigil over Denys that night. And all the while I was wondering what I'd done wrong, what I should have done, if I'd only just..."

"It's not your fault." _How can he think it his fault? _

"I know." He looked steadily down at her. "I still felt guilty but then... then I fought it out, got drunk on battle and beer and women, gods all the whores at the Peach, I think... I made my peace. You never did."

She lowered her eyes. "I was the victim."

"And you still feel guilty for your father and your brother and all yours Denys' don't you?" He grasped her chin and forced her to look up. "They did what they had to and you did what you had to. That's the way of the world, Lyanna. There's no room for your guilt."

"I was the victim," she repeated dully, as though by saying it over again and again she could make it true. _I was the sinner. _

He said nothing and indeed, he did not speak until after they had mounted and left the castle through a side-gate she knew. Jaime had thrown a copper to the ragged boy who'd curled up next to the horses who'd gawked at them, so she knew they would be safe from pursuers for a time. A ruddy knife slashed through the indigo sky and painted stars nestled close to a fading crescent moon. _The cat's eye hour, _Brandon used to call it. _Listen hard, little daughter, _Father would tell her when he took her out riding at such an early hour_. This is the time the fairies slip out of the snowdrops, after the night's dancing. Listen hard and you might hear the tinkling of their bells as they drive back to their weirwood-hollow homes, in bells of silver. Listen hard and you might hear the tinkle of their laughter and then you'll know spring is on the way. _

_I've heard it, Father, _she'd tell him, truly believeing that she had. _I've heard it. _

_So you have, sweet little one, _he'd say and stroke her hair, so fine and dark and beautiful even when she was a little girl. _If there was ever a one made for laughter and for fairies, it was you. _She'd been a pretty girl, there was no dearth of men to tell her that - men who wished to curry favour and boys who wanted to steal a kiss. But there were many girls as slender and sweet and pretty as she and Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen were both used to them when they first saw her. What had made her stand out? Her spirit, her laughter? If she'd known she would have gladly played the bluestocking like Lord Medger's daughter, the old maid Alais who was her age.

_I laughed without knowing that I courted tears, _she thought as Robert raced with Jaime. She followed sedately behind on her white palfrey, though it was not her wont. The trees here were as dear and familiar to her as friends. She lingered over them and thought of her girlhood, when her smile had been sweeter than summerwine and her laughter clearer than the tinkling of fairy bells. _The old wives used to tell me that fine teeth were the ruin of fine eyes, that a girl who liked to laugh was on the high road to weeping. I should have listened to them. _

But this was her land. This was the North where she had once belonged. They could not take this from her, the men who'd wooed her with smiles and swords. Nobody could. She smiled suddenly and there was no bitterness in that smile. This was the home of her fathers.

Robert whistled at her, the way he whistled at the pretty serving-girls and before she knew it she was racing him. His courser, as black as his hair, loped at the heels of her snow-white palfrey and both churned up snow. She was laughing by the time she'd reached the lightning-struck tree on the hill. Her cheeks were as red as the hood that had slipped off and there were snowflakes melting in her hair. She caught the look he threw at her and she knew that he thought her pretty and her smile was the brighter for it.

He drew rein and pouted. "I let you win."

She stuck out her tongue at him. "Did not."

Jaime drew smoothly up, his stallion as golden as the armour he donned at tourneys. "Well-ridden, my lady."

"For a lady?" she asked dryly.

"For anyone," Robert said defensively. "Race you again?"

She shook her head. "I'm out of breath," she said honestly. "Any maester worth his chain would weep if he caught me racing in my condition." It was bad enough that Maester Colemon had twittered about her riding at all, even Jon had been trying to persuade her to ride in the wheelhouse for the duration of her pregnancy. The fact that she pointed out that Dothraki women rode till nearly the moment of the birth and that their children were not a whit the worse for it had not helped matters.

_One woman out of four dies in childbirth among the Dothraki, _Colemon had told her gravely. _What a lesser woman might risk is not right of the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. You would never permit your royal husband or your children to incur such risks - why must you tempt fate so?_

_Because they have their whole lives before them. Because a king and his heirs are worth more than a queen, _she'd said lightly. _Because I am a husk of a woman who has given six children to the realm and has nothing left to give. Surely I might be permitted to run my own risks now? The child will not come to any harm and that is all that matters. _

She slipped out of the saddle and sat down on the stump of the tree. It had once towered on the hill, she remembered, a solitary oak as gracious as a mother. Lightning had struck it, perhaps many years before, and now the blackened stump was all that remained.

_My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away, _she thought, recollecting a Valyrian ode. _One day they will write down the sum of my deeds in their great books. They will remember the wife and the mother, but they will never think of the girl I once was. _

She would not think of it. She bent down and scooped a handful of snow. A shape, she remembered it through years of practice. Her fingers were light and deft and the snow was not cold at all though she wore no gloves. Her body remembered it.

"What are you doing?" Jaime asked curiously. The summer snows he'd already seen at Castle Cerwyn were deeper than the deepest winter snows that ever fell on the westlands and Casterly Rock. He would not understand.

"Wait," she only said, packing mud around her baby snowball. Robert was grinning - he'd been fostered at the high peaks of the Vale, he was used to snow fights. Jaime continued to look down at her from his horse, looking very elegantly and politely puzzled with one eyebrow arched quizzically. She wondered if he practiced the look in the mirror - she'd once tried to mastered the art but she'd given it up as hopeless. She'd almost gotten the hang of it at the Tower of Joy though - there really was nothing much to do but pace the floors and plan a daring escape.

It wasn't quite perfect but it would do. Father had built the most perfect snowballs but then Ben had caught the hang of it - he was better at it than Ned and Brandon and her. "Kingslayer," she said. "Close your eyes."

He was such a darling. He closed his eyes and she slammed the snowball at him with all her strength. He yelped and his eyes sprang wide open. The look on his face as he touched the mud-flecked snow on his cheek was priceless. Robert and she were both laughing by the time he'd bent down and flung a badly-shaped snowball at them. She ducked easily and the snow splattered Robert's cloak.

"Not like that," she said, beckoning to him. "Here, this way. You scoop it up so..." She shifted to let him sit next to her on the stump. Gently, she took his fingers and helped him shape it properly. "It'd be better if you took off your gloves, you'll be defter-"

He threw her a withering look. "Oh yes. And freeze to death, I suppose."

"Thin southron blood," Robert murmured, though Storm's End was further south than Casterly Rock. "We'll have our hands full teaching the children to make snowballs, won't we Lyanna?"

"That and another things," she said absently. She had plans for the children.

He tapped her head. "Stop plotting. You look like you're about to burst."

Jaime threw a beautiful snowball and it hit the side of her head. Hard. All that experience on the jousting field had given him an innate skill at throwing things hard. "Very good," she said, slipping on the hood of her cloak. "Now go away." Looking slightly petulant, he left them. She was pleased to see that he was putting his time to better things than sitting on his horse and looking pretty - he had begun to make another snowball. A most apt pupil.

"Margaery's a bore," Robert said presently.

"Bedded her yet?" She'd thought that Olenna Redwyne would wish to whet Robert's appetite by dangling Margaery before him.

He nodded. "Three nights after the tourney, I think. That was the first time. A week later she came again and from then on-" he grimaced. "Now, the way she guards her cunt, you'd think she had all the gold of Highgarden between her legs." 

She laughed. "Let me guess - she asked you for something and you refused?"

He looked puzzled. "No, she didn't. Curious, even I expected her to ask after you warned me... what do you make of that, clever wife?"

"They're hoping to market a mistress," she said shrewdly. "Aegon the Fourth had seven or eight... a man of huge appetites like yourself." _Margaery's fourteen and there's a trace of my face and colouring in hers. Interesting. _She had no complaints with whores and baseborn children but a mistress and great bastards were different. Olenna had miscalculated this time though. Robert, thicker-than-custard Robert, didn't want a mistress. He wanted a smiling face and a willing cunt, a jug of beer and a roll in the hay.

"Mistress..." He grinned at her. "Don't look so sour. What are you worrying about?"

"I was thinking about the Blackfyres-"

He waved his hand. "And spare me the saga. I'd be mad to put trueborn names on my baseborn sons when you've been kind enough to give me so many of them."

"Or stupid. You do stupid very well." She pursed her lips. There was the matter of his bastards to be considered. She had never thought of that - the girls would not be much trouble but the boys... Gendry was the oldest, a few months younger than Bran. Alaric was a few months younger than eight-year-old Edric, Delena Florent's son and the highest-born of Robert's by-blows. There was no telling what a man might do and if he ever sired a son on a pretty young thing backed by a noble house...

_They must be sent to the Wall, _she thought grimly. _All of them._

There was something nagging at her, something she had to clear. "_They did what they had to and you did what you had to_," she said slowly and looked at Robert. "What did you mean?"

"Well I meant that your brother Brandon went to King's Landing and demanded that-"

"Yes, I know that part," she said, annoyed. "You don't have to be as dense as you look, you know. _You did what you had to_. What do you mean by that? I was abducted and I was raped, I hardly had a say in that."

He slipped off his gloves took her hands in his and stroked them, looking slightly embarrassed. It was only when he touched her that she realized how cold her hands were. "You loved him, didn't you?" he blurted out suddenly. Before she could open her mouth, he put his hand up to it. "Hush, you did, I know. I saw the way you looked at him-"

"The way half the women in the kingdom looked at him! Even his own mother, Jaime says, there were some Targaryens who took their own children to their beds-"

"So you _did _love him." He looked pleased with himself.

She began to splutter in outrage. "He was a prince, damn you! He was a handsome prince who sang sad songs, of _course _I loved him in the same way everyone loved him, I didn't know he was a _monster_-"

"And wrote to him for over a year. And..." He stroked her cheek but suddenly she wished he would slap her. There was a look in his eyes that she did not like - or was she just imagining it? _This is Robert, this is only Robert. If he knew, he wouldn't tell me, he'd come and smash my chest in with a warhammer. _"Won't you ask me who told me, dear heart?"

The numbness spread from the tips of the fingers, still in his hands, to her cheek which he was stroking so tenderly. "Who?"

He stood up. "Think on it," he said mildly. "You're so clever, my lady. I know I'll never hold a candle to you and perhaps it's for the best that I don't try... you were made for the thrones and I was made for the swords. But remember this, my lady, I'm not near so dense as I look and you're not half so clever as you look." He offered her arm and she stood up, as though in a dream. Or a nightmare. "Think on it and puzzle out how much I know and how much you wouldn't want me to know."

The ride back was the longest one she'd ever ridden with Robert.

**000**

Jon was not happy.

_If this is the way I sound when I scold Bran then it's a mercy he hasn't killed me as yet, _she thought, listening patiently as he berated her. Robert had drifted off and she had had to stay and endure Jon's sulks. It was hard to listen with a solemn face, the air was cold and clear and the sunlight sparkled on the snow. She longed to race ahead, past the surging human river, ahead of the silver-and-gold cavalcade. But as queen, she rode demurely at the Lord Hand's side, followed by her daughters and ladies-in-waiting and two knights of the Kingsguard.

"You are not listening."

She laughed and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I'm sorry, truly I am. It's just... just the air, I think. The trees. The cold. Being home again. It, what's that phrase? Oh yes, it stirs the blood."

"And addles the brains, I take it. What possessed you and Robert to ride out with the Kingslayer of all men?"

"The Lion of Lannister," she reminded him. "You said they were our allies, didn't you? That I ought to wed my daughters to them, cherish them and draw them close to my bosom."

"Draw your friends close, your enemies closer." His eyes narrowed. "Of all reckless endeavours-"

"It was a bit of fun," she said impatiently. "Let me be."

_To each his own, _his face said but he did not pursue the matter. _Not like me, _she thought ruefully. _I nag and nag the children until they run screaming from me. But Jon must have more experience with unruly brats - he raised Robert, didn't he? _"I had a strange letter from Stannis," he said presently. He lowered his voice. "He suspects Cersei of infidelity."

"Cersei's a whore," she said sweetly. "Why'd he send her away from Dragonstone if he suspected her at all? I'd keep her under lock and key in some tall tower if I was a man like Stannis and she was my wife."

"He suspects her of passing off her bastards as his trueborn children."

"Little Lyanna," she said shortly. "She's Robert's - you've only to look at her face to know who the father is."

"She has the Baratheon look," Jon said mildly. "Not Robert's look alone - Renly's as well. The Baratheon colouring like Stannis, if not the face. She could as easily be a cousin to your daughters as their half-sister."

"Stannis is ugly," she said, making a face. "Lya's as beautiful as any of Robert's girls - Mya, Bella, Ioana, Daeryssa, Dagna..." Stannis had been blessed with four comely children - more than he'd ever been able to make if Cersei had stayed faithful to him. Why should he complain?

"Strangely enough, Stannis suspects that the only one of Cersei's children that he has fathered is Lyanna."

She raised an eyebrow. "Tommem, Myrcella, Tygett - they all take after their mother. Who does he think fathered them?"

Jon leaned towards her, so close that their cheeks almost brushed. "Jaime," he whispered into her ear.

She burst out laughing. "J- gods, how-how _perverse_." She was almost angry. "He accuses her of-"

"Incest, yes." Jon's voice was grave.

"That's absurd," she said flatly. "Incest - oh gods, that's simply _revolting_, I can't believe it, I won't believe it- they look like their mother so naturally they must be their uncle's children?" She flushed. "Disgusting - I always had a low opinion of the man but now..." She shook her head. "You can't honestly believe that?"

He stared off into the distance. "I have looked into the matter," he said gravely. "Grand Maester Malleon recorded the last mating between stag and lion, some ninety years ago, when Tya Lannister wed Gowen Baratheon, third son of the reigning lord. Their only issue was a large and lusty lad born with a full head of black hair who died in infancy. Thirty years before that a Lannister took a Baratheon maid to wife. She gave him three daughters and a son, each black-haired."

"He would seek to find their father by the colour of their hair?" She was incredulous. "Children are not ink and paper. Three golden-haired children and the little raven - and that proves that Jaime fathered the first three and Stannis the last? No." She shook her head decisively. "Four of Ned five children have the Tully look, red hair and blue eyes. Am I to accuse Edmure Tully of bedding his sister? Your Robert has the Arryn look but his sister Daella, she lived for almost a year and she was a little Tully."

"You mean to say that these things cannot be read in books?"

"Certainly not," she snapped. "My children all look like Robert but if they had the Stark colouring would Stannis name me an adulteress and a traitor to the realm? The man is crazed. He is too proud to admit that his seed is weak and so his trueborn children take after their mother while the bastard though she has the Baratheon colouring is Robert's."

"So you think that Robert's seed is strong and that Stannis' is weak?"

"Yes."

"They are brothers."

"By law. There were never men less like brothers than Robert and Stannis. Unless you consider Renly and Stannis." She paused. "You can't mean to say that you _believe _Stannis' lies?"

"I do not disbelieve it," he hedged. "Stannis is cleverer than you give him credit for."

"The man is honourable and just to a fault. Cleverer than Robert, I'll grant you, but blinded by his pride."

"Does it never strike you as strange, how well Cersei loves her brother?"

Once upon a time it had... but she put it from her mind. "My brother Brandon and I were just as close," she said shortly. "Perhaps closer." She did not like to think of Brandon and how close they had once been. _Perhaps there is the tiniest sliver of truth lurking in the matter, _she thought. _If Brandon and I kissed... Cersei and Jaime would they be bolder? Would they dare? Wildfire and wildfire... but no. No, they wouldn't. _"If Stannis wants himself a bastard tell him to look closer to his sweet Lya."

"How is it that you are so sure that Lyanna is Robert's daughter?"

"Robert told me," she said bluntly. "And Cersei... naming the child after me, what else could it be? It was a mockery."

"Indeed. And how pray would Robert know? About the time she was conceived, Stannis and Robert were both at the Red Keep. And Stannis is not negligent when it comes to doing his duty by his lovely lady wife's bed. Do you not think that it would be to Cersei's advantage to tell Robert that the child she carried was his? Robert would have been delighted to trump his less-loved brother over. Would he not give Cersei anything she wanted..."

"Pirates' Swoop," she said slowly. "The seat of the red branch of House Celtigar." Those were plum lands in the storm kingdoms and by rights of blood it should have passed to the nearest relatives of the red Celtigars, the Velaryons but Robert had granted it to Cersei's uncle, Lord Kevan. Lesser lands, but all rich and fertile, had been issued by royal writ so that all of Lord Tywin's brothers were now high lords in their own rights. She had thought it madness then but now she saw the advantage of it - these new-made lords did not swear fealty to Storm's End, unlike other lords of the stormlands. They were a Lannister garrison unto themselves.

"It hardly matters who the father is," Jon said curtly. "She has two brothers to inherit and Stannis considers her his. Let that be enough."

She raised an eyebrow. "Stannis' honour does not concern you?" This was not the Jon she knew. "Wouldn't it be a shame not to inform the man?"

He snorted. "Honour, yes - you believe the eldest three are Stannis' and he believes that they are not. You believe that Lyanna is Robert's and he believes that she is his. I hardly know what to make of the matter and even if I did I would not care to take steps. He is only the Lord of Dragonstone-"

"Prince," she reminded him. Cersei had coaxed Robert into permitting his brother to style himself 'Prince of Dragonstone' after Lyanna had been born. Now she was 'Princess Cersei' - a step up from 'Lady Cersei'.

"Lords, princes what does it matter? Let Cersei's children reign over a bare spot of rock. These accusations would be different if they were levelled at you but Cersei... her children will never be kings, not so long as you have four sons."

"And two daughters," she reminded him. "Daeryssa comes after Alcuin and Dagna before her."

"By Targaryen law, the Iron Throne would pass to Stannis and his sons after Alcuin. You remember the edicts passed after the Dance of the Dragons?"

She pursed her lips. "A new king. A new edict - it shall be done. My daughters come before Stannis." _Daeryssa would be twice the ruler that wretched man would be. _She was a better ruler than Robert, the wineskin with legs. Sex did not matter. _Nor does blood, _she thought, remembering what Rhaegar had once said.

By law, the Iron Throne should have passed to her eldest son, the very eldest one. And then to the Beggar King and then his nephew and then his sister... and then the Baratheons and her younger children. _But Robert won it by right of conquest and I have raised Bran and the others to be better rulers than ever Rhaegar's child or his sister could be. Bran will be, must be king someday. _She would make it happen.

"And it would be unwise to pass such slanders against Lord Tywin's daughter." He looked at her. "Some would whisper that they came from you."

"Some might even whisper that Stannis and I were lovers, though I have a better chance of seducing his horse than him," she said dryly. "Lovely world isn't it? So... what did you write to Stannis?"

"I only said that I would look into the matter, making no promises. In the meanwhile I urged him to keep his own counsel, to guard his tongue and his actions." He paused. "I do not trust Cersei," he said bluntly. "Should a whiff of this rumour catch her - the woman is wild, as you well know. And she will be quick to turn any situation to her advantage."

_And to my disadvantage. _It was a tricksy ground they played on. Sometimes she felt that everyone was against her though she had everything on her side - the princes, the crown, the North, her wits and something of youth still and perhaps, beauty. She was not so old - she had not seen one-and-thirty years yet. _My hourglass is not yet run out, _she thought. _I will see this through. _But she hardly knew what she meant to see through - was it the long winter or the game of thrones? What was her purpose? She had once known but now it seemed that she had lost her way, past all hopes of finding.

_No, _she thought as they looped a curve and she realized that they were only a half-hour's ride from Winterfell. _No, I'll find it here. I'll find it at home. _

**000**

She was back in the crypts, but this was no dream.

Benjen held the lantern and she moved in the swinging arc of light cast by it. The shadows were held at bay, sullen, wrathful but tamed. The kings of winter, with the iron swords across their laps and the direwolves curled at their feet, watched as the two of them slinked down. They were as sly as the shadows and as guilty as grave-robbers. The kings' hollow eyes stared into nothingness but Lyanna could not shake off the feeling that they were watching them both, measuring them.

_This is where the dead walk, _Brandon had whispered to her when she was a bit of a girl, scarcely more than four or five. Ned and she had believed it then though of course they'd learnt better later. _Did we? _she thought, clinging to Ben's arm. _Who is to say that they do not walk? _Beyond the Wall, there had been strange rumours heard, of wights and White Walkers.

"Do you come down here often?" she asked him. Her voice echoed strangely off the walls and almost as though he was frightened, he put his arm around her shoulders.

"Not in seven years, no," he said. "The last time I came here was the day you left Winterfell." That had been seven years ago. "I- I don't like it here. Roslin wanted to see the place after we were married but I couldn't take her - the children did though."

"Neither do I," she said softly. At another time she would have murmured the graceful compliment in tribute to his bride's youth and loveliness, teased him for a craddle-robber perhaps. But this was not the time. "Neither do I."

"You hurt Ned," he said thoughtfully. "Not letting him come down with us."

Ned had offered but she'd said no, stay and feast Robert, you haven't seen him for so long. Ben will serve as well as you. "At any other time I would be glad of his company," she said honestly. "More than glad but this... this is different. You know that. He wouldn't understand."

"He'd try to."

"It wouldn't be the same." She floundered for a word to fill the gap. "It doesn't wear on him the way it does on us. It shouldn't either, he was never to blame, not like me, and he fought it out, not like you..." _I still felt guilty but then... then I fought it out, got drunk on battle and beer and women, gods all the whores at the Peach, I think... I made my peace. You never did. _What was it in spilling blood and sating bestial passions that gave a man absolution? There must be something - her sweet Ned had made his peace years ago, she had seen it in his face and his manner. Lysa and she and so many of the women she knew had not, never would.

"I never told him you know, about _that_," Ben said mildly. "Ned. I kept your promise. The other things, he guessed-"

_And did he tell Robert? _Lyanna could not help wonder. She would attend to the matter of what Robert knew and what he had guessed later - for now it was enough that he did not enough to turn on her.

"And he told me it wasn't my fault, that I wasn't to blame." His voice was very dry. "Hardly a consolation in the grand scheme of things."

"They told me that too," she admitted. "And I believed it as much as you do." She had been a giddy, wilful girl of fifteen and he barely twelve but that did not absolve them. She had run and he had helped her. That knowledge would always stand between them and Ned. _Children carry their father's sins and fathers carry their children's. _

"I was at Winterfell all the while," he said. "Doing two things I never thought I'd be quite doing - praying and waiting for the ravens. When I heard that Catelyn had had a son I thought to take the black when the war ended... if I did not end up burnt to a crisp, that is. You remember what the black brothers used to say? That joining the Night's Watch absolved a man of all his old crimes? And then there was always the matter of the winter he would write to you about... I thought I could be of better use as a ranger on the Wall than as a paltry lord tending my nephew's keeps."

"And I was at the Tower of Joy all the while," she said. "Waiting to die. The septons preach that death absolves a man of all his sins." She punched his shoulder. "I'm glad you didn't take the oath, baby brother. Black isn't your colour."

"Neither is death yours."

"Now that's unfair. Don't you think I'd have made the prettiest corpse you ever saw? I'd be as sweet as your little bride. All in white but stained by blood to heighten the effect." As she said it, she could almost see it again. The girl and the bed of blood, the cracked lips and the parched tongue, the burning forehead and the child's thin wails. "And roses, oh yes, blue roses for my hair." There had been roses there, brittle and black and as beautiful as the kinslayer's heart.

He chuckled. "A vain corpse, certainly. But I'll wager that you'll live too long to make a pretty corpse, as long as Old Nan. We Starks are hard to kill." Before she could open her mouth he pinched her. "Hush. You're as merry as the Drowned God's priests, Lya. How Robert stands you and your dire bed and your prophecies of doom and gloom I'll never know. You were fitter by far for the other one and his sad songs and his long winters."

She had to laugh at that. "Someone has to be gloomy," she said. "Robert won't be, so it falls to me to bear the burden of the world on my shoulders."

"I wish I could say that you bear it beautifully. You look old enough to be his mother these days."

"I must have improved quite drastically then. A moon's turn ago he claimed that I looked like his grandmother."

He started to laugh but then quite abruptly, he stopped. "We're here," he said shortly and as simply as that, all the mirth went out of his voice. They were with their dead.

**000**

Tonight they danced to the northmen's songs, the proud lords and high ladies, all southron-bred, of her court. Robert's high harpist had played for them while they supped, a banquet that had lasted five hours. But when the time for the dancing came she'd called out for the songs she'd grown up listening to - the harsh, crude bastardized words of the First Men that the giants and the wildlings still spoke, in please of the grace of the tongue of the Andals and the dignity of High Valyrian. The skirls of the bladder-and-bagpipes and the woodharp in place of lute and high harp. Rousing songs of home and hearth and wideacres in place of the false songs of chivalry and courtly love.

They had cheered her choice at the lower tables, though Cersei and quite a few of the other ladies looked as though they had swallowed lemons. Robert, who could dance to anything, had whisked a politely bewildered Catelyn off and Ned had offered her his arm.

She had only danced one dance, pleading her condition. Now she sipped Arbor Gold from a goblet of polished silver and listened as the music grew wilder, as the drums and warhorns were brought out. Faster and faster the music skirled around her as the singers relieved old battles, old sorrows. They had her tapping her feet in time and if anyone had approached her she would not have been able to help throwing her train over her arm and joining the dancers.

_This is what a king and queen should look like, _she thought watching the Lannister twins leading all the dancers on the floor. Cersei was in black, Jaime in white and all eyes were drawn towards them. Nine-year-old Daeryssa was partnered with Ned's oldest son, fourteen-year-old Robb. Close to them danced another pair of cousins, her Bran and Ned's elder daughter, eleven-year-old Sansa. She could not make up her mind which pair was more striking, which the image and which only the reflection. Big, blustering Robert had Benjen's dainty little bride, Roslin Frey, on his arm and gaunt Ben led stout Lysa. She had hoped for a glimpse of her little boy but it was not to be - Catelyn had seen fit to banish him to the lower tables, far from her eyes.

"You used to lead them all." Ned took the chair next to her. "You never sat down a dance and you'd be dancing long after all the other girls were dead on their feet."

"When you're used to riding for days on end, a few hours' dancing is nothing."

"You ought to be dancing now." He studied her face. "You used to love nothing better. You had a smile this wide-" He spread out his arms and she laughed.

"I was a vain little thing," she said frankly. "I liked many things better than dancing but I always smiled the most when I danced because it made me look prettier. I liked to feel that I was prettier than everyone else - and at Winterfell I certainly was - and that men were admiring me and lusting for me."

That took him aback. He would have preferred to think his sweet little sister as pure as she looked. "Sansa reminds me of you when she dances," he said, sounding doubtful. "When she sings too... though of course Arya looks more like you."

She had noticed the resemblance too. It was most striking. "She seems a wilful little thing," she said. "Somewhat-" She rubbed her fingers and thought about it. "Something something." Their was something about the child that made her distinctly uneasy, something she could not quite her finger on. "Sansa's a little flower - I expect you'll want to marry her to the south when she blooms?"

Ned looked uncomfortable. "Cat and I haven't given a thought to betrothals yet."

"You'll have to, soon enough," she said bluntly. "Five children and their marriages will be as much to your advantage as mine. You keep this sort of thing hanging for too long and you'll have no end of trouble on your hands. We had thought to wed Bran to the Princess Arianne but- what?"

He was looking at her strangely. "You've changed," he said wonderingly. "Remember when you were fourteen and Father betrothed you? Didn't you say that you'd never use your own children so, that you'd leave them free to make their own choices?"

"It's been a long time since I've been fourteen." She took another sip from her cup, though Ned, with a northman's prudishness, did not seem to approve. "A mercy for the realm, that. Robert's immature enough for the both of us. Sometimes I wish the Lannisters would brew us up another rebellion - he's never so happy or alive as when he's fighting a war." _And it would solve all our problems with one clean swipe. Pity Lord Tywin's not Balon Greyjoy. _

"I've always mistrusted the Lannisters." There was open disapproval in his voice now. "I told you to have Jaime Lannister sent to the Wall, even Jon agreed that it would be to the best but no, you wouldn't hear of it."

"The whitecloaks would have lost their prettiest face. Who would have been my Aemon Dragonknight if I wished to play the role of Queen Naerys and put a bastard in the royal craddle? Barristan? He's not handsome enough nor young enough for your sweet sister."

"_Lyanna._"

She laughed and squeezed his hand. "There's nothing that reminds me more of home than you disapproving of everything I said or did."

"Not everything-"

"Well not everything then. Just most things. Like the time we climbed to the top of the weirwood tree to look at the robins' eggs and-"

"-And Ben broke his arm."

"Breaking bones is a stepping stone on the path to manliness and manhood and all things manly."

"I never broke an arm," he said piously.

"That makes you an eunuch then. Even I broke my arm."

"Because you were stupid." His eyes crinkled and he squeezed her hand too. "I've missed you, Lya."

"Oh Ned-"

"There, I've softened you up. Now you'll tell me why you let the Kingslayer remain."

She raised her eyebrows. "Softened me up, eh? Since when did you learn cunning?"

"Since I began dealing with Sansa and Arya."

She chuckled. She could easily see how a miniature version of Catelyn and a miniature version of herself would clash. _I set Catelyn Tully's hair on fire when I was seven, didn't I? _"Why didn't I send the Kingslayer away?" She brooded over it. "Because he betrayed his oath I suppose."

His eyes widened. "_Lyanna_-"

"Aerys killed Father and Brandon. He killed Aerys."

"Two wrongs never make a right."

"No," she said quietly. "No. But they do balance eachother out. He only did what I would have done."

"I don't believe it. You would never have broken an oath so solemn, so-"

She let Ned's words wash over his, wondering how he could still believe in her. What was there in her that he still saw? Did he see anything at all or was he only deluding himself? There were men who still called her the greatest beauty of the age, even after they'd seen her - gaunt and withered and silver-haired. They did not see her with their own eyes, only with the eyes of the singers who delighted to tell the tale of the rose and the dragon and the stag.

"_Let him be king over charred bones and cooked meat_," she said softly, almost dreamily. It was as though she was singing a song. "He would have given him ashes." Ned fell silent while she told him the story, sketching it in a few brief words, the way Jaime had when he'd first told her. That had been some nine years ago, when Robert had gone to put down the Greyjoy Rebellion, leaving behind a pregnant queen and two small princes. There had been harsh words spoken that night and 'oathbreaker' and 'kingslayer' had flown freely from her lips while he'd laughed and lounged against the windowsill, before telling her, almost lazily, how her father had died and how he'd killed her father's killer.

_He might not have killed Aerys for me, but he slew Aerys as a murderor must be slain, nonetheless. Father was only one of Aerys' victims and it was meet that he butchered the Mad King. _

Ned's face was as impassive as stone when she had finished. Looking at him, she could almost picture the face they would carve on his sepulchere. Lachrymose as he was, he only said, "But you did not know that when you pardoned him."

"Not that part," she admitted. "It only fleshes up the tale. But I did know that he killed Aerys and I knew Aerys killed Father and so..." She trailed off and looked down. He did not seem to share her point of view. "Rights and wrongs, I know," she admitted. "You don't need to preach over my head. But I hoped- I hoped that if I pardoned Jaime I would be pardoned too." She bit her lip, wondering how to explain it to him. "Not that I could ever pardon him, the gods watch us all and it would be wrong of me to assume their role. I only thought that if I was merciful, I'd be shown mercy in my turn."

It had all seemed so simple when she'd thought it through, years ago. She'd not been eighteen then, though. She could be wrong. She had been wrong about many things. An eye for an eye, she had been taught to think of justice that way when she was a girl. Murderors were executed. Thieves had their hands chopped off. Rapers were castrated. That was her father's justice. A mercy for a mercy, she'd thought, assuming that if she was merciful, she would receive mercy in her turn. _An eye for an eye makes the whole world, _she thought, remembering something someone had told her in passing once. _Who was it? When was it?_

"You did nothing that would warrant mercy, Lyanna. You were never at fault." There was tenderness in his voice and in his touch as he stroked her cheek. "Believe me on that."

There is nothing so sweet as a mother's love_, _they said. She'd never had a mother - her brothers had been her world and she'd revered her father like she did her gods. After she'd sent them to their deaths... "I'd love nothing better than to believe you," she said honestly. "Someday I might even but now... now..." She chewed her lip and suddenly the words came tumbling out because for the first time in many years, she felt truly safe, in her father's hall and by her brother's side. This was where she had always belonged. No one could take that from her.

"I think I _need _to feel guilty," she said. "Because if I didn't bad things would happen-"

"Bad?" He raised an eyebrow. "Lyanna, sweet-"

"Yes, bad. Think the Wall falling and mountains being blown away and the Doom coming to Valyrian bad. The gods made me for a reason-"

"-They made us all for a reason-"

"And they made me for more reasons than they made you." She knew he could not understand, that he would never understand. Perhaps it was the wine that had loosened her tongue, the sense of safety she felt. She was telling him things she'd always kept buried inside her, things she'd never even acknowledged to herself. "They made me _special. _He thought he was the prince and then he thought it would be his son but it wasn't, no not even-" Even drunk she would never say his name. "-Not even the boy. He's a child, he's less a prince than his brothers. I've been through more than he ever was. I knew my duty more than he ever did and I stuck to it, damn him, damn them all, _I _did." She slammed her goblet on the table and wine spilled out, splattering her silken mantle. She was too far gone to care.

"A breeder for his weapons, am I? A fool woman, am I? One saw a womb and the other saw a cunt. Fuck them, I'm worth the both of them put together." She was sobbing she realized but she made no effort to wipe them away. "Tears are a lady's weapon, the septas tell my girls but men think they're a weakness. You do too, I know you. What do you know? What do men know? They're my strength, every tear I've shed has made me harder and stronger."

_Rhaegar made me cry more than Robert ever did. There's a kinder fate waiting for Robert._

"They both thought that they could rule the world with their swords and their lances, never thinking that there'll always be a sharper sword, a straighter lance." She leaned closer to him. "Let me tell you a secret, Ned. The world's made up of players and pieces. Every man's a piece to start with, even some who think themselves players. But it's a shifting game we play and there's naught to say that a piece will remain a piece forever. A man will tell you that sharp steel and strong arms rule the world. They don't." She thought about Robert and what he had revealed just that morning. _I ought to listen to my advice. _

He studied her. "And you were a piece?"

She smiled at him. "Why Ned, what makes you think that I'm not anymore? We're all players to some pieces and we're all pieces to some players." But she wasn't, she was different, the gods had made her for a reason. Melisandre of Asshai had only seen what she had always known. "I'm tired," she said, rubbing her face. "Talking is exhausting."

"You're drunk."

"That too." She slipped her arm through his. "Pray take me up to bed."


	4. Nephews and Nieces

_My diamond's clouded over where it used to shine like light,_  
><em> And the day keeps running faster,<em>  
><em> Into the arms of night...<em>  
><em> The stitches on the tapestry say,<em>  
><em> "Everything in time,<em>_ will find it's way home again." _

**No Second Chance - Blackmore's Night**

* * *

><p>In the halls of Winterfell, in her father's halls, she spent only dreamless nights.<p>

Perhaps it was the smell of the cold, the smell of home, she mused on her seventh morning as she pushed back the velvet drapes of the canopy bed. They were of the palest gold and strewn with stars that blossomed like flowers on silver vines. She remembered working on them when she was a girl - punishment duty on long winter noons, under her father's hawk-eyes, when she'd rather have been out riding with her brothers. Stars like flowers with heart-shaped leaves curling about them... she had been fourteen then. Had her father intended those drapes to be hung over her nuptial bed, the one that Lord Stark's maiden daughter would share with Lord Baratheon?

They had bedded her in the Royal Tower, named for King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne, whose entourage had been put up there two hundred years ago. She had wanted her old rooms, where Ned's girls stayed. "It is weary work bearing the weight of a crown," she had told Catelyn, with an ingratiating smile. "I would like to play at being a girl again - do not do me the false honour of putting me up in a queen's suite." As chatelaine of the castle, it would have been Catelyn's duty to arrange suitable accomodations for her guests and accordingly she had voiced her appeal.

Ned had heard and bidden her look down from her windows the next morning, before she questioned his decisions. And so she had peered down when dawn broke her sleep, into the private court her rooms overlooked. She had not been disappointed.

It had always been her favourite time, she mused as she pulled her nightdress over her head and slipped into a tunic and breeches. Dawn. The stillness of it. The purity. She had always been the first to rise, the first one up. Circling Winterfell, when the snows were as white as a maiden's bride-gown, when the skies were rose and ivory and gold, she had felt as though she had owned it. As though Winterfell was all hers, as though the world was all hers.

The breeches were of soft doeskin and the tunic, falling nearly to her knees, of green lambswool finely-spun. Robert vowed that men's garb became her better than a woman's - but that might have been because it was easier to take a woman when she was only breeched than when she was buried under a mountains of petticoats. Becoming they might be and comfortable they were, but she seldom felt at ease in them when she was in the Red Keep. She was a queen, a woman grown, and the times when she had sauntered through her father's home as poorly dressed as she cared to be were gone.

But today... she smiled to herself and caught herself humming a snatch of some old tune, some half-forgotten tune that carried no cruel memories to torment her. Almost like a shadow, like an imposter, she felt happiness sneaking up behind her. Not pleasure, not contentment, not relief, not euphoria. Happiness. So guileless. So untainted. Yes, it could exist.

She let her feet guide her. She knew the way to the court, though she had not dared visit it in the sennight she had been at the castle. There was always the risk that she would be seen, that she would be caught and made to answer. Not only for herself but for another as well.

He was at the archery butts, at fifty paces from his target. He had begun at thirty, he would end at ninety. That was his way - he did not care to challenge himself when it came to archery, it seemed. He held a good seat in the saddle and a strong sword for his age, his lance and his shots might have been better. Ned wrote to her often and she had questioned Ser Rodrik thoroughly.

_Why, _she thought as she heard the whistle of the goosefeathered arrows flying, _I know more of his prowess than I know that of my younger sons'. _It ought to have made her feel guilty. It gave her only a thrill of pleasure.

He had heard the pad of her leather slippers long before he had seen her. By the time she reached the rim of the court, he was ready for her, his arrows slipped neatly into their quiver, his face set in solemn lines as he waited for her, the way Stannis' children would wait for their frightening father.

"Your Grace," he said, bowing low.

She nodded at him, just barely acknowledging him, and strolled towards the butts where his arrows formed a semi-circle around the bull's eye. There was one at the centre, one alone, but the others were sadly askew. "Wait," she called over her shoulder, before he could turn tail and run as he clearly wished to. Deliberately, she pulled the arrows out, one by one, and ambled towards him. "Shoddy work, lad."

He bowed again, like a little marionette. He was too slightly built, too slender or so it seemed to her. Robert's boys were all big and burly, twelve-year-old Brandon topped Jon and Robb by a few inches, and even eleven-year-old Joffrey was the same height as them. _Not Rhaegar's build either, _she decided. _Gracious, how very like Ned he looks. I might even have spared his touchy honour if I'd known he'd come to look so like my side, there was never any need to claim that he and Ashara Dayne were lovers. _

"What's the furthest at which you can shoot?" she said briskly, looking down at him. She was careful to keep her face smooth and empty. If he caught the warmth in her eyes or the tenderness in her voice, well there was nothing she could do about those subtle hints. There was nothing she wanted to do about it.

"Ninety paces, Your Grace," he said dutifully.

She longed to ask him to call her something else, even 'Aunt' would have been better than the cold 'Your Grace' but it would not have been proper. There were certain boundaries not even she could cross. Why, if nothing else, Catelyn would have had hysterics - she had been sorely tried when Lyanna had suggested that Ned's bastard dine with them at the higher tables rather than be kept out of sight at mealtimes.

"Hmm. And who's the best archer at Winterfell?"

"Theon Greyjoy, Your Grace," Jon said and a frown creased his brow. He had small liking for the snide, sneering ward of Winterfell she knew. She had not taken much to him herself, he reminded her rather too strongly a smiling slug. "He can shoot at two hundred paces."

Lyanna whistled, impressed inspite of herself. "Guess how many I can shoot at," she said cheerfully. When he did not answer, looking uncertain, she laughed. "Come now, guess. Where's the spirit in you, lad?"

_Fled when you appeared, _his face said but dutifully he said, "A hundred, Your Grace?"

"Close. A hundred and fifty. I would outshoot your father and uncles every time, when I was your age. Gods, it was one of the only things they'd let me do - naturally jousting and fencing were out of the question - so I got better and better at it. Though I've never had Greyjoy's skill, I must say." She put out her hand and when he stared at her, she sighed and rapped his head.

"You're slow, lad. You remind me of Ned." She smiled kindly to take the sting out of her words but his face remained as cool and distant as ever. "The bow and an arrow, Jon Snow. Won't you want to put your old aunt to the test?"

Dutifully, he handed her the bow and plucked out a goosefeather arrow for you.

"Can you make these yourself yet?" she asked, pacing backwards.

"Yes."

"Ah... good. Many's the afternoon I've spent at the fletcher's or the smithy, feathering arrows and honing swords. Why I can even put the edge on Valyrian steel and that's not said of many a woman - or indeed a man." He nodded. "So... have you started on fire-arrows yet? Bodkin points?"

"No."

"No? That's a pity. At the castle in King's Landing, the young lads of your age are put to work on all sorts - though that's a bit beyond you in the north, isn't it? No, I remember Brandon and Benjen weren't set to it either, more's the pity, Ned knew a little bit I think but Jon Arryn was all full of ideas. He had no sons of his own so naturally he loved to test his theories on his wards. Mock battles and setting children in the blizzards and against the savages of the hill tribes, oh that was all in good fun to him... but of course Ned's told you all about that, hasn't he?"

"Yes."

The boy was maddeningly reserved. She kept her smile on and chattered brightly away, asking him what bows he was adept at and so forth. When he continued to answer in monosyllables, the wary light in his eyes never quite leaving his face, she felt like slapping him the way she felt when Brandon had put in his name at the tourney.

_Why does he mistrust me so? _she wondered. _Perhaps he was frightened of me at first, that is only natural, but now... I've tried to be as kind and gentle and gay as I know how to be. What is the matter with the child? _Unbidden, the thought that Ned might have let something slip, that Ned did not wish for her to be too close to the boy entered her mind but then she dismissed it. Ned could never be so cruel. Nor so foresighted.

When she had reached a hundred and fifty paces, it seemed almost pointless to show off in front of that still, stone statue of a boy. Nevertheless, she did, stringing the arrow and concentrating only on the target. She had always had a good eye, she had always kept up practice with a bow and arrow, even in King's Landing. It was usually to let off steam, sometimes to demonstrate to her children, sometimes to win a contest. She let the arrow fly through the air and cross as she felt, it was pleasing to hear it twang and land with a very satisfactory thud at the eye of the target.

"You shoot brilliantly, Your Grace."

"Thank you," she said graciously and handed him the bow. "You ought to, you know."

"Your Grace?"

She fixed him with a beady eye. "If you intend to join the crows at the Wall, as your Uncle Benjen assures me you do."

Jon flushed and looked down, scuffing his feet.

"I won't tell your father if that's what you're worried about but why, Jon? Why?"

"It is an honourable calling, Your Grace." Somehow he found it in him to look up at her. She swallowed hard as she met his eyes - Benjen and Brandon had both had blue-grey eyes like their lady mother's the old servants claimed. Ned's and his little girl Arya's were a dark grey, almost black in some lights, but Jon's were like Lyanna's, like her father's - paler, a chill steel-grey starred with a dreamer's long, black lashes. When she looked into his eyes, it was almost like looking back into her father's eyes.

It was with difficulty that she said, "Honour is like an island, rugged and without shores." _And once we are on the outside, we can never re-enter it. _"How old are you, Jon Snow?"

"I turn fifteen on my next nameday, Your Grace."

"A child of fourteen." _No younger than Margaery Tyrell or Roslin Frey or Daenerys Targaryen and they are woman wedded and bedded, yet I call this one a child. _

He stiffened. "Begging Your Grace's pardon, but bastards grow up faster than other children. Your Grace," he added, as though he wasn't certain that he was being polite enough.

She snorted. "No, it's girls who grow up faster than boys. Bastards who've been raised with as many privileges as you - and don't you give me that look, lad - grow up at the same rate as trueborn children. To be sure, Lady Catelyn's seated you at the lower tables for a night but what of it? You drank your weight in wine, didn't you, that night? That more than makes up amends for it, I should say. You've had lessons with your brothers and sisters, you've ridden in the woods and hunted boars and wolves with your cousins last week - many would say you've had privileges too great for a bastard. High-born, perhaps, but born on the wrong side of the blanket none the less."

He ducked his head. He knew who his mother was, or so he thought - he must have heard the whispers since he was little more than a babe. Was that why he took such umbrage?

"What place can a bastard hope to earn?" he asked quietly. "In the Night's Watch, men have risen as far as their merits have permitted."

"The Night's Watch is not the only place for a bastard, Jon." Gently, she brushed his shoulder with her fingers, half-expecting him to flinch. When he did not - though he stiffened - she put her hand more firmly on his shoulder. "Have you given a thought to the Kingsguard? Political office? Do you not recall King Jaehaerys' Hand, Septon Barth who gave the realm forty years of peace? He was born lower than you ever were."

Jon said nothing.

"Think over it," she said quietly and let her hand drop, sensing that he was not comfortable with her. "The Night's Watch is perilous cruel, both for a man and a boy. There are many, oh many who regret joining it willingly. Oh I'll grant you that there was no honour it once - but that was many long years ago. It draws it's strength from looters and rapers, beggars and boy-whores now."

"And orphans." He looked intently at her. "Your Grace sends a tribute of fosterlings from the Seven Kingdoms every year to the Wall."

She smiled sweetly at him. "There are only three men for every mile of the Wall. It would be lapse of me were I to not secure it better and besides... I have a soft spot for the north and for dear old Lord Mormont. He was my father's friend once. But that does not mean that I would see one of my own blood chained forever there. The oaths it demands are unnatural. Perhaps that is why men attach so much honour to them."

He did not look impressed.

"Come to the Wall with me," she said suddenly. "I leave next month for it. You may take your decision then and there. If you back away, I will think the better of your intelligence but if you choose to stay I promise that I will not stand in your way. Why, I will even talk to your father if you wish it."

He looked relieved. "Father will not be pleased," he said rather dolefully. "He says I mustn't take a decision until I come of age on my sixteenth nameday."

"And so you mustn't. You're only a child now, how much can you possibly know of the world?" Smiling she said. "Perhaps you will find it to your liking, perhaps you will not. If not, King's Landing will always be open to you and who knows how far you might rise there, higher than even your brother perhaps, eh? Wouldn't it be fine to be the Hand of the King or the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Jon, while your younger brothers were only lords of northern holdfasts and Robb himself only the Warden of the North, scarcely known outside his domains?"

Jon could not hide his smile though he gravely said, "Such things scarcely bear thinking of, Your Grace."

She chuckled. "Perhaps. But we can always dream. That's the only thing that's made life bearable to me. My dreams."

His face said that she had more than enough to make life bearable for her. Perhaps she did. Perhaps she was wrong to stand in his way. Perhaps Jon's place was on the Wall, he was a dragon though the wolves had made him one of their own. Had she not once contemplated the exile of Prince Viserys by sending him to the Wall? The song of ice and fire - Rhaegar would have known what to do with his son. Rhaegar had always known. _Perhaps that was his downfall, _she thought. _The gods grow jealous of one too like themselves. _

"Ghost," he said quite suddenly and she whirled around. The white direwolf pup that he had claimed as his own had sneaked up behind her, without her noticing.

"What a hunter he will make one day," she said, chuckling as he knelt and beckoned the pup towards him. "A silent killer."

"He was in my room when I slipped away," he said wonderingly. "Still fast asleep, I wonder what made him come here."

"Probably your scent." She knelt beside him, eying Ghost curiously. "So he's as clever as he is beautiful, eh? What a lovely pelt." She reached out to pet him.

"Don't," Jon said sharply. "He'll-"

The puppy nipped at her fingers but she only laughed and rubbed his ears. He made no sound, he seemed as mute as he was white, but he did let her rub him and then tickle his stomach.

"Ghost doesn't take to strangers so fast," Jon said curiously, watching her. "I thought he might bite you since you've never been so close to him."

"We're family. Though you seem to try your best to forget that."

Jon blushed and looked guiltily away. "I beg your pardon, if I have been amiss, Your Grace-"

"Aunt," she said sharply. When he looked puzzled, she repeated it again. "Not Your Grace, Jon. Aunt. I am your aunt, you know. Your father's sister? Aunt. Say it now."

Slowly, carefully he whispered the word as though it would sting him. "Aunt."

"With a little more conviction perhaps, but that'll do." She smiled at him, a wide, genuine smile that made him smile too. It was the first real smile that he'd given her. "Nep-" she broke off suddenly when Ghost's ears perked up and he jerked away quite suddenly.

Jon stood up, uncertainty written clearly over his face. She looked over her shoulder, at the small figure perched on the railings, his legs swinging and a malevolent smile on his twisted face.

The Imp had been watching.

* * *

><p><em>Lyanna R.<em>

With a flourish, she signed the last of the two letters. She had chosen to breakfast alone, with only Brienne in attendance. Between sips of peppery broth, the only fare she could now force down, she had exchanged tidbits of nourishingly salacious gossip with Brienne and finished two letters she had been putting off for a week. The morning's events had put the matter more clearly to her, made those letters more imperative to her plans.

"The Kingslayer has not found the woods of the north to his taste," she said lightly. "My sweet brother shall be most distraught."

"Ser Jaime was never fond of hunting," Brienne said. "Even at court, he often declines His Grace's offers to hunt in the Kingswood, doesn't he? And the game here is thicker than it is down south."

"Gramercy for thy courtesy, child," Lyanna said teasingly. "Bah - he only ever seems to decline Robert's offer when Cersei's in court. Curious isn't it?"

Brienne did not look as though she found it too strange. "Well they are twins," she said. "I should think they would be very close."

"Hmm... perhaps too close, don't you think?"

Brienne looked puzzled. "I don't know what you mean, Your Grace."

"Nothing, dear. I was just... teasing." She slid the letters into skins of vellum.

"He's very kind to her, isn't he?" Brienne said thoughtfully. "It's so easy to believe every cruel thing that's said of him but when I see him with Princess Cersei, somehow I can't quite believe it. I do think most of it's all slander."

"Well, rumour at any rate. I can never countenance the ones Robert tells me, about his prowess with women. He's always struck me as a more er, Loras Tyrell type. A pretty boy with a talent for jousting."

Brienne snorted.

"Well he _is _pretty. Come now, you can't see he's not pretty."

"He is very handsome," Brienne acknowledged. "The very mirror of his sister."

"No wonder she delights in his company. Cersei Lannister is the vainest woman I've ever laid eyes upon. Not but that she hasn't something to be vain of, but she does take it to extremes. The Maiden, the Mother and the Crone - she seems to have taken leave of her senses and she thinks she'll always be as young and fair as Margaery Tyrell. Me now, I now I'm a crone already and I'm perfectly content with that. No cause for grief. It'll be a hard day for the poor woman when she finds her first wrinkle or when her boys bring home sweet young brides of their own."

Brienne smiled, used to Lyanna. "He is so very good and sweet to her," she said thoughtfully. "Not at all like Prince Stannis. I know he's said to be very just, a great and honourable man, but I can't ever overlook that he's often very unkind to her. He doesn't seem to... respect her. And he should, shouldn't he? I mean in public at the very least, in front of the servants and his children? Yes, he's often very cruel to her, I fancy."

"That's justice, Brienne."

"It's not the sort of justice I call justice," Brienne said stubbornly.

Lyanna chuckled. "It's not to my taste either," she admitted. "But well, we're women aren't we? Soft-hearted, weak, frail creatures who must be looked after for our own good." She snorted. "If I had a copper for every time I've heard Robert or Stannis saying that... I like Renly better in that regard. Playing with the roses, he's become all the sweeter for that." She sealed both letters, the first with the deep golden wax the Baratheons favoured, the latter with the jet black wax used to seal letters of mourning.

"Sweetling," she said, turning to Brienne. "I have important work for you."

"Letters to the Wall?"

"No... they're to be sent to Dragonstone. To Stannis." Brienne's eyes opened wide but Lyanna forestalled the question that rose to her lips. "Silent as the grave, remember? Isn't that what you promised me?"

Brienne nodded, though she looked uncertain.

"Keep them with you at all times and be ready to dispatch them when I give you notice. You're to take them to Maester Luwin whenever I send you a message - be it at high noon or in the middle of the night. I shall tell you to send either the golden one or the black one, but not both, never both. Understood?"

Brienne bowed. "My lady," she said formally. "I am at your service."

Lyanna smiled tenderly, as she would at one of her own daughters. "Of course you are," she said tenderly. "Who else's service could you possibly be at?"

* * *

><p>Framed by the pale morning light that streamed through the brocade curtains, the two women and the girl made as pretty a picture as you could wish for. A tableaux - Maiden, Mother and Crone. Sansa was the first to look up from the tapestry they were working upon.<p>

"Aunt," she said, beaming and jumping to her feet. "What an unexpected pleasure, why we are so very delighted!" Such a sweet child, so frank and free - she reminded Lyanna not a little of a lapdog.

Lysa rose slowly, her face as sour as a septa's. "Ecstatic, I'm sure, my lady." Sweetrobin would be fostered at Winterfell and though Jon hadn't permitted Lysa to remain with her sister and her son for a few months after the court travelled south, she was still smarting. She knew well enough who had whispered in Lord Arryn's ear.

Catelyn was as graceful and gracious as ever, her face a lovely mask under her a warm smile and serene eyes. "Lyanna," she said, drawing her to a cushioned chair by the window. "You have certainly filled my daughter's heart with delight - 'If only Aunt Lyanna would join us one day', why she said those very words not five minutes before you arrived."

The girl blushed prettily. Lyanna could easily believe it of her - Sansa loved songs and sweets and silks and southron chivalry passionately. She was just a little girl, ready to fall in love with a pretty gown, a lover's verses, a bright smile. Aunt Lysa waddled like a duck and still nursed her snot-nosed little boy. Aunt Lyanna was a queen and her sons danced divinely. Which aunt was easier to love more?

"Charming," Lyanna said, taking the seat next to Sansa. The girl's adoration was very sweet... perhaps useful, even. One could never have too many admirers. "Jonquil and Florian, is it? Your embroidery is as pretty as you are, Sansa." _Remember to use a man's name when you speak to him, Brandon. Do not call him 'child' or 'lad', be he ever so low or ever so young. He will pay reverence to you for the respect you have accorded him by using his name._

"Thank you, Aunt Lyanna." Sansa beamed and offered her a needle and a skein of silk. Lyanna shied away.

"Thank you, no," she said dryly. "I am the lily of the field. I spin not, neither do I toil."

Catelyn's eyebrows rose. "The Seven Pointed Star," she said mildly. "I hadn't the faintest notion that you read it - Ned always did say that you were most diligent and devout in your worship of the Old Gods."

"Diligent, devout and duped." She shrugged. "A right little fanatic, I was. King's Landing has made me rather more... how should I put it? Cosmopolitan in my views."

Catelyn favoured her with a wide smile. "As has Winterfell. Do you remember when you first visited us at Riverrun? I could not have been more than eight then."

"_We do not worship trees,_" Lyanna mimicked little Catelyn, tilting up her nose and scowling in a way that made Catelyn and Sansa laugh. Even Lysa smiled. "_Away with you and your foul lies, you heathen_!"

"Children certainly can be little monsters," Catelyn said dryly. "Stubborn, conceited, self-absorbed..."

Lyanna coughed, "Arya," and winked at Sansa who promptly fell into a fit of giggles.

"Lysa," Lyanna said, turning to her. "Be a perfect darling and harry my maids for me, won't you? Those little scandals, they're all mad for our dashing Stark men-at-arms and if you won't play mother to them and bully them about a bit, I shouldn't wonder if things should get rather out of hand... it wouldn't be half-so-bad if the men were not at the hunt. You can always marry off a maid of honour to some nobleman or the other, no questions asked, but a man-at-arms... and even the stableboys. Not but that it isn't proper - I maintain that every girl should have a good romp in the hay when she's young, husbands like that sort of thing in their brides, sugar and spice. Riding astride and so forth_._"

Sansa looked pleasantly scandalized.

"We choose our men-at-arms for their dashing good looks," Catelyn said dryly. "We are rather short of scandals at Winterfell - we always hope one of our wards will do something... but they are all wonderfully discreet."

Lyanna beamed at her. "You don't have to tell me that! I spent fourteen years here and the greatest scandal we ever had was when we found out that Hodor's real name was Walder. And d'you know who his doting grandmother had named him for? Why his grandfather, Lord Frey!"

Sansa's eyes widened and even Catelyn looked piqued. "Old Nan and Lord Frey? Lord Walder Frey?"

"That irreplaceable charmer." Lyanna grinned. "It took forever to worm the story out of her... yes, he'd come a-visiting some time in the past hundred years and put a little Walder in Old Nan's belly... so very fecund, you know. And then little Walder grew up and there was another Walder following, or rather a Hodor... but a wet nurse and a wizened lord is not much of a scandal, don't you agree? Cheer up, Sansa, I'll whisk you away to King's Landing one day and then you shall have your fill of sin and folly."

Catelyn could not hide her smile. A place at King's Landing as the Queen's niece, what prospects it would open. Lyanna did not take her eyes off her good sister as she addressed Lysa. "Therefore you must herd those silly girls off to their embroidery hoops... monsters and maidens you know. You can be the monster, Lysa."

Lysa rose. "The maids only follow their mistress's example. But shall I herd off only the ones who are engaged with the men-at-arms and the stableboys? The prettier ones seem to be trying their hand at your Robb, Cat."

"They are most impertinent," Lyanna declared. "They ought to be trying for my son, Brandon. Princes before lordlings, that's only proper. Pray tell them that I am most displeased with their lack of ambition. A girl should be ambitious."

"I shall convey your displeasure and send them to their sewing. They can always hem shirts for the poor - they loathe it but it really is so very productive."

"Productive for the poor or productive because they loathe it?"

"The latter." Lysa curtseyed and left, shutting the solar doors softly behind her.

"Sansa," Catelyn said, gently touching her daughter's hand. There was a tenderness between them that was very sweet to see - Cersei and Myrcella shared it too. Sweet, but a little sad. Wedding bells would ring for the girls in a few years and then... there were so many brides who never saw their families again. Lyanna was one of the lucky ones - Lysa wasn't. Catelyn wasn't.

"Sansa, sweetling, perhaps you ought to-"

"Oh let her stay," Lyanna said comfortably, leaning back in her armchair. "She plays so sweetly on the high harp - won't you favour us with a song, Sansa?" If the girl was sharp, she'd read their lips while she played. If she wasn't... well there was time enough for her. Even the dullest blade might be honed.

"If you wish, Aunt," Sansa said, delight evident in her trusting little face. "I have never been schooled in the art, I fear I am most green but if it gives you pleasure-"

"You sing like a nightingale," Lyanna assured her. "The untutored voice is the freshest and truest - but I shall send Robert's harpist to you this afternoon if it is agreeable. Music will stand you in better stead than embroidery, dancing still better and riding best of all. A man won't care if it's a maid or his lady wife who darns his doublets, but he'd rather ride and dance and listen to his lady singing than a servant, wouldn't he? It's the best way to hold a man's heart, unless you're a good cook."

Sansa's face fell slightly at the last. Riding and cooking were not to her taste, it seemed.

"Play us 'Jenny of Oldstones'," Catelyn said, nodding towards the high harp which stood on the window seat. Obedient as ever, Sansa curled up in the window seat, close enough to read her mother's lips if she chose but not so close as to hear all of the conversation.

_She makes a pretty picture now. In a few years, she will be a thing of beauty and a terror forever if her mother lets me have my way with her, _Lyanna thought with satisfaction. _So trusting, so malleable.  
><em>

"She is beautiful," Lyanna said smoothly. "Twice as beautiful as my own daughters."

Catelyn smiled fondly. "Your girls are only children yet, Lyanna. In a few years-"

"They haven't her colouring," Lyanna said. "That coppery hair - 'kissed by fire' the wildlings beyond the wall call it. They say it brings luck."

Catelyn's eyes were guarded as she said, "I hope she has much luck in life."

"It should be every mother's hope. You do well to say it." Absently Lyanna put a hand on her stomach. "A fair, fine day for hunting won't you say? I hope our men have good sport. Robert was chaffing for boars and wolves to spear. He has it in mind that he'll catch himself a direwolf." She gave a tinkling laugh. "There was that one direwolf your children found but I suppose it was a stray from beyond the wall? Never found about that, did you? Passing queer but then life _is_ queer..."

Catelyn's fingers had unconsciously shaped themselves into a star pattern. The symbol of her faith. So she misliked that the direwolf had been found dead in the snow, with the pups in her belly and the antler lodged in her throat? Lyanna didn't blame her - there was something strange about it. Best not probe it now.

"And which of your children found the wolf?" Lyanna asked, though she knew the answer.

"Robb." Catelyn frowned. "He would have done better to let dead things lie. The children are fond of their little pets and they seem remarkably tractable for things so wild. And yet-"

Lyanna put a gentle hand on her shoulder. "We will speak of this later. I like it as little as you-" She had not given even a passing thought to the direwolf save for amusement that Ned's children were raising their sigils. Lord Lannister ought to gift his children little lion cubs, she had told Cersei. Sweet little lion cubs to rip out their throats. "Let us pass on to a topic which pleases me more. Robb - he's quite a man now isn't he?"

"Only four and ten," the doting mother said promptly. She said in the same way Lyanna had protested that Daeryssa was only nine when Jon had raised marriages and alliances.

"He looks older," Lyanna said. "Old enough to be wed, or betrothed at any rate. Have you given it a thought?"

Catelyn looked away, the colour rising in her cheeks. "I had once broached the subject with Ned but he-"

"Has no head for alliances and suchlike," she said dismissively. "Never had, never will. His head's packed full of snow and honour that one - clean, cold and utterly useless. I suppose he hemmed and hawed and said Robb was too young, he promised that he'd speak of it later when Robb was a man grown?"

Catelyn chuckled. "Who would know him better than his own sister?"

"Children grow up faster than Ned thinks. Ned was always slow-" _Forgive me, sweetling_ -"and the north has only made him worse. He is admirably suited for war, such a fine general I know I should be so very proud of him, but peace?" She made a face. "No. Ice and iron run through our veins, they say. In the olden times we were all warring clans just as the ironborn were all squabbling reavers... we've never been able to forget that."

Unbidden, the memory of Rhaegar rose to her mind. Rhaegar, the Prince of Summer who would have brought peace. Robert had brought only war and bloodshed in his wake and she... she had been the cause.

_I made my amends and still I do. Is it not enough?_

Catelyn's voice was guarded. "In the north, peace is like war." She was careful to add, "Though you must know that better than me."

_She has become more of a northwoman than me_, Lyanna realized with a shock. _She has become as innured to Ned's ways as I have to Jon's._ "I spent fourteen years here as a little girl. You spent thirteen as a woman. You know more of the north than I do now. As for foes... wolves and winters - that is all you face here."

Catelyn's voice was reproachful. "They are bitter foes, Lyanna."

"Bitter yes," Lyanna conceded. "But not insurmountable, not... not intangible." She thought about how to phrase it and her hands moved restlessly. "You can see what you are up against, you can face it like a - well, like a man." _Ah the joys of the straight and narrow. _"Here you face the elements. They can be tamed by a strong man's will, shaped. In the south, you are up against men and women." She looked Catelyn straight in the eyes. "You can charm them, you can coax and cajole and coerce them, if you have the wits. But you will never, never be able to tame them, to make them your own." _There will always be a wildcard, there will always be something you did not see, couldn't be expected to see. And that little thing, that girl's ribbon, that poet's verse, will be your doom. _

Catelyn lowered her eyes. "Then it is well that you will never require Ned's services in the south."

"You think like your sister's husband," Lyanna said lightly. "I might, I might not - surely he will never fail to heed a sister's call of distress? But put your fears to rest, Catelyn, I doubt that he would be of much use to me or to anyone in the game of thrones, save as a facade. He's greener than Renly's child bride." Not that that was much of an insult - Margaery was cleverer than half the court, Lyanna thought. _Certainly more than Cersei._ It would be a triumph if she could coach Sansa half as well as the Queen of Thorns had taught Margaery.

"It's wrong to leave these things lying too long - betrothals and suchlike. Brandon is twelve now, by all rights he should be promised. And yet-" she snapped her fingers. "Nothing. We ought to have set the Martells to breeding a daughter for him when he was born. Yes, breeding - Prince Oberyn can make only girls. We should have found a bride for him to breed something more than bastards. Someone younger and more tractable than that wilful Arianne of theirs."

Catelyn's eyes were bright with curiousity. "You offered for the Princess Arianne's hand? I had heard a rumour-"

"And had a mouthful of niceties from the Sand Slug for our pains. He was flattered, he was honoured, he was charmed... but no, his dearly beloved daughter has fallen madly in love with a stable boy and will not be urged from her hot romps in the hay to a little prince's cold bed."

"A stable boy?" Catelyn hooted with laughter and Sansa looked up from her harp in surprise. From the look on her face, Lyanna could tell that she hadn't been listening to a thing. She was too well-bred to eavesdrop - Lyanna would have to knock that out of her. "Truly?"

She made a face. "Gods know. She has turned down all the offers she has received to date... or perhaps the Sand Slug has, for her. I believe he means to shut her up in a tower someday and pass Dorne to his son, Prince Quentyn. Perhaps he fears that if she makes too great a marriage she might come to claim her rights from her brother, at the head of her lord husband's army."

"So who will you betroth Brandon to?" Catelyn's eyes were bright with curiousity. Dorne was far, far away from Winterfell, too far to pique Catelyn's curiousity in the fascinating matter of Arianne Martell. Lyanna shrugged and dropped it. She had hoped to find an ally in her good sister. She had found only a friend.

"The highest bidder of course," Lyanna said cheerfully. "Though I suppose that we'll see him running off with a pig-girl or a steward's daughter, children always seem to be falling in love with those their parents disapprove of the most. Yes, I can just see him fleeing with some bright-eyed little septa and marrying her in a rocky little fort in the mountains... and then we must needs welcome back the prodigal son into our arms when his wife's with child. A pellet of poison in her cup or a steel kiss when he wearies of her - which won't be long, he _is _Robert's son - and then we shall be looking out for another royal bride."

Catelyn chuckled. "Strange is it not that your elder sons are not yet betrothed while your third son is?"

Edric had been betrothed to little Lady Alysanne Bulwar a year before - after the late Lord Jon Bulwar had died in a summer fever and his sole heiress had become a ward of the court. In time, Edric would be the Lord of Blackcrown, a high lord of the Reach in his own right - as good a marriage as a third son could hope for. In time, Alcuin might even be betrothed to the infant Ermesande, the Lady of House Hayford. Lord Hightower had a few daughters and Joffrey would be wed to one of them but as the crown prince, Brandon would need a greater alliance. Envoys had already been sent to Essos seeking a bride from the most powerful houses.

"Strange," Lyanna agreed, nodding. "But back to your Robb. I had a match in mind, if you are agreeable - have you noticed Cersei's little girl? Myrcella - quite a beauty isn't she?"

"She is as fair as her mother," Catelyn said, with a look that made it clear that she did not think much of Cersei Lannister. "She seemed... sweet-natured," she added, almost as though she could not believe it of Cersei's spawn.

"Really miraculously sweet considering who her mother is," Lyanna said dryly. "Her father too, he is not known for his charm." Stannis or Jaime - neither of them had ever been called 'sweet'. Nor would they be if they had a say in the matter. "A gentle soul and clever for her age, I think. You ought to play draughts with her - I never saw a child take so well to the game."

"Littlefinger was a rare hand at draughts," Catelyn said absently.

"Still is," Lyanna assured her. "He bubbles with charm, that one." She leaned forwards, closer to Catelyn. "The King's niece and the Queen's nephew - Robb Stark and Myrcella Baratheon. She has royal blood both ways - through the Lannisters and the Baratheons. Two great houses."

The Tullys had not been a great house in the old times - marrying Myrcella would be a step up even for Robb. By the way Catelyn's eyes glistened, Lyanna could see that she had taken the idea as well as a trout took to fresh bait. "And she is so very young, so unsullied yet - she might be fostered in Winterfell. If she is to be a lady of the north, if she is to come to know Robb better she ought to stay here. She would be in your keeping and you might bring her up as you chose, without Cersei's interference."

_A hostage to our pleasure, _Lyanna thought with satisfaction. _We will hold Cersei's heart in the north. _As the King's niece, Myrcella could be wed at her royal uncle's pleasure with or without her parents' consent. The match was grand enough that Cersei, Stannis and the Lannisters would be able to voice no objections. Cersei's daughter would be an honoured guest at Winterfell... an honoured guest in the way Lord Greyjoy's son was.

"I will speak to Ned," Catelyn said, her face a mask that could mean everything or nothing. "For my own part, I have no objections to such a match."

_Just spit out that you're delighted. _"Good. We will announce it soon." Lyanna grinned at her and even Catelyn's face relaxed. She smiled. "And so you will have three fosterlings at Winterfell from now. Myrcella, Sweetrobin and Lysa. I would say Lysa's needs more looking-after than Myrcella but you can be the judge of that." She folded her hands. "Three fosterlings to take the place of those who must leave you."

Catelyn bowed her head. "Sansa," she said quietly. "Arya." She had been expecting it.

"And Bran." Lyanna touched her hand. "I will love them as I do my own children. Sansa will flower in a year or two - she will be an ornament to our court. Bran will be a knight, perhaps he will even fight in the Kingsguard as he dreams of, eh? And Arya..." She was still unsure about Arya. "She will be a credit to you when the septas are through with her." _And a credit to me after the silvercloaks are through with her. _The girl had spirit.

Catelyn's voice was wry as she added, "So Robert permitted you to train your daughters in swordcraft. I have seen your Daeryssa training with staffs, under your guardswoman - the Lady Brienne. Arya looks on everyday, when she ought to be singing or working on her stitches, and begs me to let her play too."

"My daughters as well," Lyanna reminded her. "Robert is the most of tractable of husbands when you know how to manage him."

Catelyn nodded. "Ned said you more wolf pup than child. He said you reminded him of Arya. Arya..." she sighed and looked troubled. "Perhaps she will fare better under your care. I have never understood her, not as I have Sansa and I might have been too... hard on the child. I suppose I ought to relent and permit her to train with Daeryssa now? Doubtless that is what she will spend her time doing in King's Landing."

Lyanna chuckled. "Though you do me grievous wrong, Catelyn. Perhaps Ned cannot remember - he was never with us for long when we were children - but I was very like Sansa too." _Silks. Sweets. Songs.  
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"Sansa," Catelyn looked over at her daughter thoughtfully. "What plans have you in mind for Sansa? You seem to have lain plots a mile deep, Lyanna."

"Now you mustn't speak of plots like sewer lines going down a mile deep, Catelyn. They are more like... webs, yes, circling round and round and round. I am a fat spider catching flies, yes," she said. "But I'm hardly at the centre of the web."

She paused to gather her thoughts. "Lord Tywin will never have the Imp as his heir," she said carefully. "He might pass Casterly Rock to Cersei and her brood but I doubt it... the whisperers say that he has considers his brother Kevan his heir."

Catelyn was clever enough to see where this led. "Kevan's elder son Lancel is a comely lad," she said smoothly. "Loras Tyrell, Prince Brandon, Lancel Lannister - Sansa was telling me last night which of the young men of the court she admired the most."

Sansa could fall in love with anything pretty. Men, rabbits, gowns. "Sansa Stark and Lancel Lannister." Lyanna made a face. "It sounds funny though."

"Lady Lannister will sound better," Catelyn said cheerfully. "My daughter as the Lady of Casterly Rock, is that what you would make of her, Lyanna?"

"It would be pleasant to have a true ally among the Lannisters," Lyanna had to admit. She would need to teach the girl that it did not matter who she married - her first duty was to her aunt and the Starks.

"It would be a brilliant match," Catelyn said. "If Ned does not object." The look on her face said that Ned _would_ object. "Perhaps you ought to speak to him before me? He has no love of the Lannisters, as you well know."

Lyanna nodded. Jon had wanted her to marry her own daughters to the Lannisters but a niece was just as good and moreover, safer. If anything should happen to her own little girls...

Sansa was still singing, still wrapped in her own dreams. She was a sweet thing, but Lyanna was beginning to fear that she was rather slow. Ned's daughter, through and through. "She is lovely," Catelyn said, almost sadly. "Lady Ashara was lovely too."

Lyanna almost jumped. "Beauty of a sort," she said quickly. "The brand of Old Valyria, the same stamp that the Targaryens bore. You will forgive me if I say that I never found her as comely as she claimed to be." _She could have passed for Rhaegar's sister, that one. Rhaegar's son could pass for hers if the need ever arose. _

Catelyn pursed her lips as though she did not agree. Then, finally, "I cannot blame Ned for his... transgression. I saw how fair she was, with my own eyes. We were so very young then, and they were both unpromised. It was at the tourney of Harrenhal, do you remember?"

Lyanna spoke out without thinking. "As though I could ever forget." The bite in her voice made Catelyn draw back.

"My apologies, my lady," she said softly, lowering her eyes. "I know how hard it must be for you to even think and to hear-"

Lyanna shrugged, recovering her senses. She had been too sharp, she had not been thinking of who she was with. "It is hard. A woman's lot in life is hard. You have only to look at your husband's bastard and remember the woman who usurped your place. I have only to listen to a few thoughtless words, uttered by chance or malice."

"Lyanna, I never meant to-"

"I know you didn't," Lyanna assured her, pressing her hand. "I know you too well, good sister. Perhaps I have spent more time with your sister Lysa but as a companion, I value you and your friendship far more." Catelyn read the earnest smile on her face correctly and responded with one of her own.

"As do I," Catelyn said. "Lysa has become... temperamental of late. We have grown farther apart as sisters with the years but you and I, Lyanna... your letters to me have been invaluable. I thank you for them and your kindness and consideration."

The letters. _Ned. Ashara. Jon. _"It was the least I could do for you," she told her. "Better for you to know the truth of your husband, as I do, than to be left wondering all your life. And the Lady Ashara, she was... she was good to me whilst I was held captive. I would have had you know that though their child was conceived in sin, the mother was as nobly-born, as true and gentle as the father."

She paused for a while and then drove home her point. "They say bastard blood is treacherous, that they are abominations with unnatural lusts. Perhaps it is true of many, but when I look at Ned and Ashara's child, I cannot believe it. He is entitled to more respect than that, is he not, by dint of parentage at the very least?"

Catelyn looked as though she was being forced to swallow a lemon. "Oh yes," she said in a slightly strangled voice. "Quite. I have always taken care to treat him as befits the noble rank of his mother... ever since I had your letters. I have raised him with my own sons."

Lyanna smiled. "Of course," she said smoothly. "He is destined for greatness, I should say, just as your own sons surely are." She rose and stretched lazily. "Though you would be within your rights to be pleased if I were to take him off your hands, would you not? I shall have a word with Ned."

Catelyn's eyebrows shot up. "What possible use could you find for the bastard?"

"A loyal guardsman about me, at the very least. A competent swordsman, if your armsmasters are still the men they were when my brothers were boys. Why," she said, chuckling, "I might even use him as the Velaryons use the Bastard of Driftmark - to woo the ladies. Such a comely lad, that Aurane Waters... though Snow's not in his league."

Catelyn looked as though she did not approve of the flippancy. Like all the northerners Lyanna knew, she took herself far too seriously. A southron summer would do wonders for her temper.

She drifted over to Sansa, playing 'The Bloody Meadow' badly but dutifully. "Sweetling," she said, putting a hand on the girl's shoulder lightly. "Your tune is too sad for your years."

Sansa scooted over on the deep window-seat to make place for her aunt. "Oh, I like the sad ones best," she said with a shy little face.

_Why such a sad song, Lyanna? _

_Oh, I like the sad ones best, Father. I always have. There's just something in them that makes me feel so happy. Shivery-happy, do you know what I mean?_

She shivered now, almost unconsciously, as she took the harp from Sansa's hands. "Blood will tell," she murmured and shook her hand when Sansa looked puzzled. "Nothing, child, you must excuse a woman in her dotage. As long as you keep in mind that life's not a song, that it took oceans of bitter tears to brew the sweet songs you love... then you should be fine."

Her fingers brushed against the wood of the seat instinctively, for luck. _Touch wood for luck. Touch the weirwood for luck. _"Though you might... benefit from a few lessons. 'Lord Deremond at the Bloody Meadow' is not an easy song for beginners - it requires both skill of the hand and a certain maturity, a depth of voice which a girl of your years would lack."

_Tis better for her to lack it, with her so young. T'would be better if we all lacked it, if there were none in the world who might sing 'The Bloody Meadow' as it should be sung. To be sure, there would be no magic left in the song, there would be less magic left in the world but what need have we of magic? What has magic ever brought to the world but strife and grief?  
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"Your aunt was a rare fine singer in her day," Catelyn said lightly, drawing nearer to them. Was that a challenge in her eyes? "She put all our bards to shame when she sang for us at Riverrun and her brother Brandon could hardly keep his eyes on me, his betrothed, for weeping at his sister's song. How well Brandon loved you, Lyanna!"

_How well indeed. _

Sansa's eyes shone. "Oh do sing it for me, Aunt!" she said earnestly. "I do so want to improve but I'm afraid I'm fearfully clumsy at it."

"You could never be clumsy at anything, even if you tried, Sansa," Lyanna said, pinching her cheek. "You were born to be an ornament to the world." Sansa blushed and looked pleased. To her it was a compliment. _To me, to her sister Arya it would be an insult. _

Gently, she began to pluck the strings of the harp. She leaned back against the windowseat and closed her eyes, letting the light stream over, hearing only the crackle of the flames in the hearth and the child's steady breath so close to her. She thought of old Lord Deremond for whom the song had been written, who had held the Riverlands for king and country. She thought of the Reds of the Targaryens and the Blacks of the Blackfyres, of the Hammer and the Anvil, who had bled the same on Weeping Ridge and given Redgrass Field where Deremond had fallen it's name.

And then she thought of the waters of the Trident running red with blood, years later, of royalists and traitors, dragons and stags. Of the tears that had been shed and the songs young girls and starry-eyed minstrels would sing, years later. She thought too of the song of ice and fire, of the great song that had yet to be sung.

And then, she began to sing.

"_And red the grass beneath his feet, and red his banners bright, and red the glow of setting sun that bathed him in its light..._"

* * *

><p>With the men off hunting, the women had the practice yard to themselves.<p>

The court was full of women, women in steel and boiled leather and roughspun tunics and breeches. Girls with the fawns of the Queen's silvercloaks pinned cockily at their throats, paired off with stocky, silent northwomen who had ridden with their men for years.

Dornish girls of the highest blood bent the bow and shot off morningstars, side-by-side with hardy peasant stock from the Riverlands. Kings' bastards from the Crownlands crossed blades with no-name orphans and streetwalkers.

Maege Mormont was the first to greet her. "Lyanna," she said warmly and Lyanna smiled pleasantly in response. A charming old biddy, Maege was if you rubbed her the right way, but perhaps a trifle too fond of recalling the old days when Lyanna had been a little girl at Bear Island and Maege herself in the prime of her long youth.

"It does my heart good to see you," the stout, grey she-bear said, gripping her hands and looking up at her. "Why, when I remember those days when your father brought you and your brothers to Bear Island. It was a year or so after your lady mother died and your lord father was-"

"Not distraught," Lyanna said dryly. "He took us on a great tour of the north. He said it was time Brandon learnt of the land he was to rule one day but it was really to find us a new mother."

Maege chuckled. "Well no, not distraught," she admitted. "Some called him cold, but I always found him to be a hearty man, whether in his cups or no. Noble, gallant and his tenderness for his little children was delightful to see. You four were his world and a more distressing bunch I'd never laid eyes on till then. You, in particular, you quite took away my desire for a hearth and home of my own and it was many years before I plucked up the courage to find myself a man to give me little ones of me own."

Lyanna let her chatter on, while she let her eyes rove over the practice yard. Brienne, the Queen's Hand as the others often teased her, had nine-year-old Daeryssa drilling with a glaive. It was dreary, soulless, mind-numbing practice but it would stand Daeryssa in good stead when she turned to a sword by and by. Lyanna had never had much patience with it and so she had never bothered to learn how to use a sword, even when she was older. It would be a sad state for the realm indeed if the queen ever needed to defend herself with her own sword.

Arya Underfoot, as Lyanna had begun calling the girl instinctively ever since Daeryssa had told her of the moniker the castle girls used for Catelyn's younger daughter, was perched on the railings, watching them. She looked the soul of despair now, her legs swinging in disconsolate time to the beat of her cousin's swinging staff. Lyanna smiled, amused at how the girl resembled her with her horsy little face and the sweep of coarse brown hair falling into her dark grey eyes. The news she had brought from Lady Stark ought to cheer Arya Underfoot today.

Maege's long-legged daughter, Dacey, was in deep conversation with Obara's half-sister, Nymeria. They were both tall and comely to look upon and the contrast between slender, pale, shy Dacey and voluptuous Lady Nym with her dusky skin and snapping tawny eyes was pleasing to look upon. There were two in the yard that Lyanna had not expected - Asha Bolton and the red woman.

After the Greyjoys' Rebellion, the youngest son, Theon, had been sent as a ward to the Starks on Jon's command. Lyanna, knowing that a daughter could be as potent as a son and that women of the ironborn had oft captained longships of their own, had demanded that the only daughter, Asha, be sent as well. She was a fresh-faced young woman in her twenties. Her sharp features were too irregular to be truly attractive and the mocking sneer that matched her brother's made it harder still to find beauty in her face. Yet there was still something about Roose Bolton's slim young wife that drew a second look.

She had half-grown sons of her own, Lyanna remembered. The match had been brokered soon after she had flowered, without the consent of her family naturally. She had proved most... contrary at the beginning. Something about a death at Dreadfort and then the dungeons for the stubborn girl, she'd heard the whispers and felt a moment's pang of guilt before telling herself that a kraken ought to be able to her own. The Boltons would soon leave for their own lands, it was natural that the Lady of Dreadfort might feel interest in the Queen's warrior women.

The red woman though... Alcuin and Sweetrobin had come to call the Lady Melisandre that and though it was very childish, Lyanna could not help but emulate them. She reminded Lyanna of nothing so much as a Whitewalker wrapped in a sheet of fire, she was hot and cold at the same time. Fascinatingly repulsive. Desirably despicable. She was everything Cersei wanted to be. She made Lyanna want to ward her off with garlic, stars of silver and stakes of iron, as old wives did the witches of winter.

Maege was nattering on about pears. "Oh how you loved those pears of ours. You'd clonk them off the trees in the orchards before they were ripe and such a scolding I gave you! Not that you ever paid much heed to anyone."

"Not then, not now," Lyanna smiled.

"Spoilt stiff of course, have any of your silk-and-velvet southron toadies ever told you that?" Maege was northern to the core and was as apt to dismiss anyone south of the Neck as a lickspittle toady as southroners were to call northmen hairy, tree-hugging savages.

"They never had need to. I like being spoilt."

Maege waggled a fat finger disapprovingly at her. "Where was I? Oh yes, the pears. I remember we shipped you cartloads of them after you'd left and when you were big enough, you'd write us pretty thanks on scented sheets. Such elegant penmanship, such graceful courtesies - but face to face you swore like a stableboy, even when you were a little girl."

"With three brothers and a heart bent on thrilling adventures, I never thought of myself as a little girl. I leaped straight from little boy to spoilt woman."

Maege chuckled. "Benjen was a babe in swaddling cloths then, and you'd have no truck or trade with him. You worshipped Brandon, I remember, but Ned, oh gods, how you tortured him! Once you went around catching worms and slipped a can of them into the pie..."

Pears with brandy, set afire and flavoured by the spices of Tyrosh. Briefly Lyanna remembered the supper Littlefinger had hosted for her, oh many years ago. An intimate supper for two. She could still taste cloves and cinnamon on her tongue when she remembered it. It had been the taste of corruption.

"I did not mean the worms for Ned," Lyanna said carefully. It was one of her earliest memories - the pie and the worms, the colour of father's doublet and the laughter that had rung through the poor, smoky log hall. She did not remember the faces of those who had laughed and sang and drank themselves well and truly under the table that night - all she could remember was her purpose. "I meant them for Jorah."

Maege's face was as stiff as a wooden doll's. "My nephew. Do you remember him?"

Lyanna shook her head. "He must have been half grown then," she said wonderingly. "Fifteen years to my four?"

_I'm sure it will._ She must have met Old Lord Mormont at one time, but now all that she knew of him was through his letters, the letters that were always addressed to Brienne.

"I suppose you don't remember him now?"

"I'm sure I do," Lyanna said lightly. "I'm sure I remember him quite well, Maege."

"Maege." Maege patted her cheek. "How kind of you. You used to call me the ugly, grouchy old she-bear."

"I thought that you meant to steal Father away from me," she said earnestly. "I couldn't have that, could I?"

The tell-tale flush rose to Maege's cheeks and confirmed Lyanna's suspicions. Lord Rickard and Lady Maege had been lovers. Practical as ever, the woman spared her the blushes and the giggles and bluntly said, "Well I never claimed he was distraught did I? He was young enough, though you four'd given him more white hairs than his years deserved. Yes, he was a fine man just in his prime. And me..."

"You must have been a banquet to the senses." She would have been in her twenties then.

"I was well enough," Maege grunted. "Though you wouldn't say it now to look at me." Laughing, she slapped her pot belly in a way Lyanna had seen many old men do. "A man stone-blind would'a seen it, Jeor told me," she said frankly. "I guess that's why you never took to me? Children are sharper than we ever give them credit for."

Lyanna thought about Sansa and decided that a 'some' ought to have been added.

"I was apt to fall in love then and I think I loved him for all of a fortnight... fickle, you could call me but at least you wouldn't say mercenery, oh no never that of me. Poor Jeor dabbled in matchmaking and we laughed at him together behind his back." She chuckled. "He made me a proposition, your noble father did. Half guilt, half striken honour but I packed him off with a flea in his ear. Yes, it had been the merriest of romps, yes I liked him well enough as a friend, yes Jeor wanted me settled but no to Winterfell and being the envy of all the pretty young ladies they'd thrust at him and no to you four wolf-pups. He tried to talk me around it but he was as relieved as I was when I said I'd knock him out if he did."

From the look on her face, Lyanna could easily believe it of her. "I'm glad," she said impulsively. "Glad that you didn't marry him."

"You wanted him all to yourself."

"I wanted everyone all to myself."_ Perhaps that was why I never took to Robert, the first time we met. I knew I could never have all of him. Perhaps that was why I fell in love with Rhaegar, because he seemed willing to give everything up all for me. _He hadn't, not hardly, but she had been fourteen then, young and naive and impulsive. The roses he had spilled on her lap had spelt love then. _  
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Maege smiled wanly. "Selfish child. Clever child." She paused for a moment before laughing and saying, "My Dacey is half in love with you, I do believe."

"Oh?"

Maege shot her a look. "Now don't smirk at me in that way, young lady. Your head's full of trash, I do believe, your father would never approve. You've been corrupted by southroners and when a woman says her daughter's in love with you all you can think of is the cult of Lys and the-the-" She waved her hands uselessly in the air, looking nettled.

"I was always corrupted," Lyanna said cheerfully. _How northmen love to mock southron decadence. _"It's only now that I've had time to perfect my smirks. Made them more insiduous, so's to speak." Northerners called it the cult of Lys, women who coupled with women. Robert had assured her that there was no sight so delightful. Varys had arranged a private viewing for her, at Chataya's, with pale Dancy and dark Alayaya. It had been most erotic but she could never confess that to Maege. "But I gather what you mean. She's fascinated by me, is she not?"

Maege smiled. "She wants to join those silvercloaks of yours, bless her heart, she's begging her poor old mother to let her ride with you, tells me I have no end of daughters to keep me company after she's gone."

Lyanna smiled. Maege Mormont had taken a common-born lover, a peasant from her fief, and borne five daughters with him. The youngest, eight years old, had been named for Lyanna. Dacey in her late teens was the eldest, heiress to Bear Island now that her uncle was at the Wall and her cousin Jorah attainted. "No doubt she will be a formidable warrior, judging from her mother's repute."

"Kind of you to say that." Maege sighed, looking troubled. "It's good work, honourable work to defend the poor and the weak and the downtrodden I dare say but her mother will miss her."

"You would not miss her any less if she were a son. But you would let her go with less misgivings wouldn't you, just because it's the way? Sons off to war, daughters off to marriage. Nobody likes it when the order's reversed." Lyanna sighed. "We recruit from orphans mainly, street rats, gutter rats from Fleabottom. We puts staffs and spikes in their hands and when they're half grown off they go to man the streets of King's Landing. We're looking to spread to the other towns and gods willing, villages too someday."

"You're too thinly spread now for that. You have what, a hundred girls?"

"Ninety-four and most of them are Daeryssa's age or not much older." Lyanna sighed. "It's become a fashion among some of the Dornish girls, after the Red Viper's daughters took interest in it. I suppose I should be grateful for that much."

Maege reached up to pat her shoulder. "Gods willing, it'll be more than a fashion if you wait a few years. You'll be Queen Alysanne all over again, you'll see, child. The gods reward those who are good to the meek and the humble, they always have."

"I hope so," Lyanna said, without much conviction. "Though in my book it's only the gods reward those who reward themselves. And since I'm not rewarding myself, just others, I doubt it'll ever be much good, just a fad of the Queen's they'll call it and it'll peter off after I'm dead and gone.

Maege chuckled. "Why fawns though?" she asked wonderingly.

"Stags, fawns," she said negligently. "I had the idea from the White Fawn - you remember that outlaw wench of the Kingswood Brotherhood? She was a kitchenmaid at Storm's End before she ran off to do great things - rather like those stories you have of peasant lads who turn into valiant knights. A Baratheon bastard, the old servants at the castle could tell you, a half-sister of Robert though she was a woman grown by the time he was born."

"Hardly warrior-like, to have fawns for your symbol. You ought have chosen wolves."

Lyanna gave her a look. "I'm not raising my own private army," she protested. "They are not Stark women, sworn to the Queen. They are sworn to the kingdom."

"Not the King?" Maege asked shrewdly.

"Not the King," Lyanna said quietly. "The whitecloaks and the goldcloaks are sworn to the king, they are bound to please him, to humour him when he concocts a bloodbath for the kingdom. But my silvercloaks, they are only bound to the kingdom, sworn to defend women and children, the poor and the weak."

"Your silvercloaks still," Maege murmured. "You might claim them to be sworn to the kingdom but they will always be your pets, Lyanna."

"Obara Sand is hardly my pet," Lyanna said dryly, thinking of their Lady Commander. She decided to change the subject. "She's quite tall, your Dacey. She tops me by a few inches and I've always been called tall for a woman. How tall is she, pray?" _Nothing compared to Brienne though. _

"Six feet," Maege said proudly. "Her father, now he was seven feet. Evens it up, since we Mormonts were never tall."

"Comely too. Takes after her father, I suppose?"

Maege chuckled. "I chose him for his looks didn't I? Goodness me, at least I could _choose_. Though I'd say you got your pick of the crop, choice or no choice, dear."

"It was my father's choice, yes. But it would have been mine too had I been given the chance, you know how well I love him."

"Of course." Maege began to hum a popular tune, something about the Battle of Bells. Blood and bells and bastards. It gave Lyanna a headache even to listen to it. "How well you must love him though you were one of the most selfish children I ever saw. Oh well, love conquers all, they say. Makes black white, white black. I wonder which one it made you?"

"From black to white, of course. Robert made a woman of me. Now, if you will excuse me," Lyanna said abruptly.

"Of course." Maege bowed, a paper-dry grin on her face. "My lady."

Lyanna nodded and wandered over to Arya Underfoot. She was still watching Brienne and Daeryssa, her face as dark as a thundercloud. When she saw Lyanna, she slipped off the railings, looking ready to bolt. She seemed not to have taken very well to Lyanna - perhaps because Sansa adored her so, perhaps because she was as weary as any child would be of forever being compared to her aunt.

"How goes it, Lady Arya?"

She had no choice but to stay, now that she had been spoken to. Catelyn had drilled her manners into her - with a whip, Lyanna sometimes thought. "Well," she said cautiously.

Lyanna did not try an engaging smile. Instead she simply leaned on the railings next to Arya, wondering whether the child would shy away. _Lya Longface. Arya Underfoot. _She was as skittish as a filly under a strange rider. Lyanna would have to be honest with her, frankly honest, brutally if need be. Children could sniff out lies and they resented being taken for fools or told they were too young.

"You should be at your stitches," Lyanna said with mild reproof. "A woman's needle will take her as far as a man's sword."

"Yes, Aunt," Arya said dutifully.

"I've heard," Lyanna said conversationally. "That the Faceless Men have devised seven hundred and fifty-six ways to kill a man with a needle."

Arya's eyes widened.

"Wouldn't you like to be a Faceless Men, dear?" she asked companionably. "My brother Brandon once did... I wanted to be a pirate and Ned wanted to be a white knight waging the war of righteousness and killing people for honour, of course he did. He never had much imagination. But no, I can tell from the look on your face that all you care about is those big, stabby, pointy things. Rather obvious way to kill people, but to each his own."

"I don't want to kill people," Arya said as primly as her sister would have.

"You just want to poke them through with holes, yes? That's fun too."

"No-"

"What about Sansa?"

Arya made a little face.

"Not even Sansa?"

"She's my sister," Arya said dutifully.

"All the more reason to stab her," Lyanna said brightly. "Haven't you heard the story of Princess Rhae and Princess Daella? They were so madly in love with their brother, Prince Aegon, that they fought to the death to see who would win his hand in fair combat."

"Well, who won?"

"Neither, silly. They were Targaryens, weren't they? Rhae's blade was dipped in the tears of Lys and Daella set hers ablaze with wildfire. It was a good song, when I was a girl, though I suppose you're not like to hear it. Still, after I'd heard that I gave thanks that I'd never had any sisters. Brothers are so much more agreeable, aren't they? They let you walk all over them."

Arya was smiling now. "Not _all_ over them," she objected. "Just a bit."

"And that's the best part! Ned gave in without a struggle and so I found him too tame. Benjen struggled too much so I gave him up as a lost case. But Brandon was _just_ right - part struggle, part submission and didn't I gloat when I won over him? No wonder he was my favourite." She twisted her fingers absently. "Now who's your favourite? Dear little Rickon, that monkey Bran or your strong, big, brave Robb?"

"Jon," Arya said promptly, her eyes holding Lyanna's. "He's my brother too."

Lyanna found that she could not quite meet the child's eyes now. "Of course," she said softly. "Of course."

Suddenly, little Arya was not as entertaining as she had seemed to be. Lyanna decided to cut the conversation short. "Your mother has given you her permission to train with my daughter everyday. With staffs and swords and any other pointy things you might care to think of. Not poison or wildfire if you're thinking of asking, that's for when you're a little older."

Arya's face lit up but then slowly, as Lyanna watched, it fell. Glee gave face to mistrust. "She didn't," she said stubbornly. "She wouldn't have. You're trying to-" She coloured and looked down but her aunt's interest was piqued.

_So this is the clever one after all. _"I'm trying to? Corrupt you?" she said smoothly. "Draw you to my side? What put that blessed notion into your head?"

Clever Arya might be, but guilefull she was not. Her face was an open book, from the thin lips pressed tightly together to the guilt in her eyes. Not fear. Guilt.

"Not Jon Snow, is it?"

"Robb," Arya said quickly. "Robb told me that. He's the oldest, he knows the most. I'm sorry, I never should have listened, I never should have blurted it out. It was just stupid of me, I'm really very stupid, Sansa and Mother and Septa Mordane will tell you that. You just have to ask them, I'm stupid and wicked and-and you must whip me, really I need to be whipped to get some sense into my head, I'm as thick as a castle wall-" She was babbling now, her eyes darting back and forth like a trapped animal's.

Lyanna put her hand gently on the child's shoulder. "Dear Arya," she said kindly. "I won't have you executed for that. You told me what was in your mind and I applaud you as much for your honesty as I deplore your bluntness." There was so much potential in the child, a diamond in the rough to be polished. The child was charming but Lyanna wondered why Jon had been so quick to suspect her, so quick to communicate his fears to Arya. "You never need fear me. I am your aunt."

_And so is Aunt Lysa, _Arya's face said. Lysa Arryn had called her a savage boar the other night when she'd managed to upset Sweetrobin yet again. Sansa, the pet of both her aunts, had tittered. Catelyn had only half-reprimanded Sansa but Arya had borne the brunt of her disapproval. Clearly, Arya did not get along with women.

"And Robb would not have told you that."

"You don't know Robb," Arya said stubbornly.

"Perhaps not Robb." Lyanna shrugged. "But I know enough of bastards to know that they are always older than trueborn children, ever more skilled in... guile and deception. They have to be, poor souls, they are coached in mistrust and suspcion from birth. It is the surest way for their survival. I have seen my lord husband's byblows, all sixteen of them, and I have compared my own children to them. Who do you think was found wanting in the balance?"

Arya scuffed her foot in a way that reminded Lyanna of Jon.

"Nevertheless, it was wise of you to mistrust me from the beginning or rather, to take Jon's advice. It was a clever man who knows where best to gather advice." She smiled at Arya and uncertainly Arya smiled back. "Though I hope you won't be quite so quick as to 'blurt it out' next time. Wait a while, listen a while before you speak."

"I know," Arya said humbly. "I'm just always forgetting. Mother's quite given up on me."

"Mother may have but Aunt Lyanna won't. You girls and Bran are to come with me to King's Landing when we leave."

"Sansa, me and Bran only?" Arya looked aghast.

"Yes. Your father's place is in the north, your mother's with him. It would be monstrous cruel to tear the babe Rickon away from her and as for Robb, he _is _the heir to the north," Lyanna said firmly. Then she relented and added, "Perhaps your half-brother as well. It's good for lads to see the world and the Red Keep will never turn away a loyal Stark man. Needless to say, it would please your lady mother if he was far away from her. Perhaps it would please him too, yes?"

Arya looked as though she was weighing something. "So that's why Mother will let me train?" she asked suddenly. "Because she knows you'll let me anyway, when we're south? And it wasn't a-" She blushed.

"No," Lyanna said dryly. "No, it wasn't a trick. Did your half-brother put it in your head that I had nothing to do but seduce nine-year-old girls over to the dark side? I have, as it were, bigger fish to fry."

Arya looked suitably abashed.

"Though every little fish counts, I suppose." She tapped her niece lightly on the shoulder. "Run tell Brienne to start you with staffs. It's not all fun and games and flashing, dancing steel though. It's dreary work, I warn you, as dreary as stitches and a shade more exhausting. Do you have the heart for it?"

"Oh yes," Arya said, her face lighting up with her impish grin as she slid off the railings. "More than heart enough for it." And she scampered off towards Brienne and Daeryssa.

"Go wreck havoc and have fun!" Lyanna yelled after her. _And don't let Daeryssa give you a hard time. Heartrending to admit, her elder daughter was a bully and a bitch._ She took after her mother and the sigil of the Starks in that way.

"How charming."

The red woman had sidled up behind her, in that queerly shadow-slithering way of hers.

"Lady Melisandre," Lyanna said courteously, turning to her. "And how may I serve you?"

"It is for me to serve Your Grace."

As ever, Lyanna's eyes slid to the ruby nestled in the hollow of her throat, like a drop of blood or a glowing ember bedded in snow. _There is base sorcery hidden there_, she had often thought. _Some witchery which holds the seat of her power, as it is said that the hearts of the weirwoods hold the greenseers' magic._ She was unfamiliar with the sorcery of the warlocks of Asshai but there was no doubt that their magic was potent and potentially a weapon. The red woman, alien as she was, could only be an ally though how she might be used Lyanna was not yet sure. It would serve her well to cultivate her.

Forcing a laugh, she said, "And how do you wish to serve me?"

Her smile was almost vixenish as she said, "Why by teaching you how best you might serve yourself, my lady."

Oh? "We shall hold discourse on that later," Lyanna said lightly. Sweeping a hand over the practice yard where the women duelled she said, "This sight is passing strange, heathenish, to half my ladies but to you it must surely not be too unfamiliar? Thoros and Jalabhar Xho have told us so much of how equal men and women are in the lands of deep summer."

Melisandre chuckled. "Those bedtales would appeal to you most, of all women. Yes, they are equal... of a sort. They are both free to grasp power, to claim it for themselves if they will. They are both free to grasp their doom. But I would not put too much faith in the tales of the pink priest of Myr or the beggar prince, Your Grace."

"I would be better served if I were to heed your words, yes?" Lyanna said dryly.

"Who better to spin the webs of sorcery than the sorceress of Asshai?" The words 'priestess' and 'sorceress' were interchangeable with the Asshai'i.

"Sorcery. Witchcraft." Lyanna sniffed. "The maesters of the Citadel would see you burnt. They are concoting a really marvellous system in which there is no place for... heresy such as yours."

"Heresy? Is that what you would tell yourself? Would you deny the power that you know to be true, that you feel in your very bones?"

Lyanna leaned back against the railings. "Power. You mean magic, I suppose. You would show me a charlatan's conjury, pay a queen with an hour's trick and curry her favour with a honeyed tale? Well, if you're clever enough to fool me, why should I begrudge you?"

"It would be a fool indeed who would take Your Grace for a fool."

"Honeyed words again." Lyanna laughed. "Why play the fool when I know you to be cleverer than that? What do you mean to sell me, Lady Melisandre? Go on, I'm listening. The only coin you could pay me in is love, which I find scant these days. And love, really, love cannot be sold. I am weary of being sold imitations."

"Love is a rare coin," the red woman acknowledged. "But there is one more you would be paid in."

"Oh? And what's that?"

"Truth."

"A sorry choice of words. Truth is a perilous sword. It cuts deep."

"It is no less than you deserve." The woman's crimson eyes seemed to burn into hers, like the ruby at her throat into which Lyanna could never look in for too long.  
>Again she forced herself to laugh, feeling more wrong-footed and unsure of herself than she had for many years. She felt like a player thrust on stage with no book to guide her and only an imperfect understanding of what her role was. "How unkind of you, Lady Melisandre! That sounds so very like treason."<p>

"Should it not? Your Grace has a debt to pay and it is long overdue."

"The gods have long memories when it comes to sinners. We flourish like green bay trees of the valley while the virtuous are cast on rocky ground."

"You find the Seven Pointed Star to your liking?"

"I find the couplets poetic, though I was ever forsworn to the Old Gods."

Melisandre said nothing, though by the glint in her eyes Lyanna could see that she had meant to say,_ There are no Old Gods, nor New Gods. There are only two._ She said it often enough and it must have taken much for her to hold her tongue. So she means to woo me yet. Interesting.

"Come to the nightfires," Melisandre said, her fingers just brushing against Lyanna's arm. It was a cold morning and Lyanna was surprised to feel that her touch was warm, though she had worn no gloves. "Come to the nightfires tonight and let me show you the truth in the flames."

Lyanna took the red woman's hand and squeezed it. "I thank you for your courtesy in offering me the chance to study your faith further," she said sweetly. "Such zeal and devotion... to me and to your gods." Deliberately, she dropped Melisandre's hand. "But no, my lady. Not tonight. Tonight I have other plans." _Let her woo me further. Let me see what she has to offer._

Melisandre's face was as smooth as cream. "I am sorry to hear that, Your Grace. Perhaps some other night?"

"Perhaps." Lyanna let the promise tingle between them, let it seep through. Smiling, she dipped her head and left the practice court, the feel of Melisandre's fingers still warm on her arm. It made her shiver.

**A/N: Wow, Promises Kept is on the alerts list of 44 members! Thank you, thank you everyone for following this story and for all of your wonderful reviews! I know this chapter isn't up to the mark - though it's long! - but I've been very busy with college admissions and stuff. It's college season in India here! Has anyone read the spoilers for ADWD? I have!**


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